What’s New in PHP 8.4 RC1 and the Updated Release Cycle?
The first Release Candidate of PHP 8.4 is now available, introducing a two‑year active support plus two‑year security‑fix policy that extends total support to four years, while outlining new language features and download options for Windows, Docker, and Linux.
RC1 Released
The first Release Candidate (RC1) of PHP 8.4 has been published. The 8.4 branch is now in feature‑freeze and will receive only bug‑fixes until the General Availability (GA) release scheduled for 2024‑11‑21. Three further release candidates (RC2, RC3, RC4) are planned before the final PHP 8.4.0.
New PHP Release Cycle Policy
The PHP Core team approved an RFC that extends the active maintenance period from one to two years and aligns end‑of‑life dates with the last day of the calendar year.
Under the new policy each major version receives two years of active bug‑fixes followed by two years of security‑only updates, giving a total of four years of support.
Effective‑support and end‑of‑life dates now fall on the final day of the calendar year, preventing immediate termination when a version enters security‑only phase.
PHP 8.4 Highlights
Key new features in PHP 8.4 include:
Property hooks
Asymmetric visibility
Lazy objects
Unicode 16 support
Various improvements and deprecations
RC1 Windows binaries are available for download. Docker Hub provides images tagged 8.4-rc. Pre‑built Linux packages can be obtained from the Ondřej Surý and Remi repositories.
Compilation guides are provided for Ubuntu/Debian‑based and Fedora/RHEL‑based distributions, describing the steps to build PHP from source.
Signed-in readers can open the original source through BestHub's protected redirect.
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