PHP 5.6 announced, statically typed (!) “new” PHP announced by Facebook devs

PHP 5.6 goes alpha

PHP 5.6 has been announced for a while now, and these days things get serious (code-freeze, alpha release). Bruno Skvorc of Sitepoint has released an excellent article on SOME of the new things in PHP 5.6, definitly worth reading. The changes are “smaller” (as far as I can judge this), no huge things that will change everything.

Facebook works on (and with) a “better” PHP, called Hack

As we are talking about new versions of PHP already: Keep your eyes open for HACK for HIPHOP. Facebook, who have already developed the game-changing HipHop-VirtualMachine that allows to precompile PHP for extreme speed gains, will release HACK, an improved version of the PHP language (!!) in the near future. No joke (or a very big one, but this looks promising). Julien Verlaguet of Facebook has presented this at the CUFP/ICFP 2013 (a Boston based conference), this seems to be very very interesting: They even made PHP a statically typed language (!). This might have a great future, definitly something we should keep an eye on.

Current PHP:

<?php

class MyClass {
    public $property;
}

Hack (for the HipHop VM), the “improved” PHP:

<?hh // note this ! ;)

class MyClass {
    // note the type definition
    public float $property;
}

Talk of Julien Verlaguet of Facebook:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKWNjFagR9k

Slides of that talk:
http://cufp.org/sites/all/files/slides/2013/verlaguet.pdf

Much more interesting slides, showing syntax etc. by Keith Adams of Facebook:
http://de.slideshare.net/zerutreck/taking-php-seriously-keith-adams