PHP 8.1 First Release Candidate is now out

Published On03 Sep 2021

PHP 8.1 - RC1 is now out

PHP 8.1 is the upcoming major PHP version, and the first release-candidate of PHP 8.1 is now out.

PHP reached its feature-freeze last July, and PHP 8.1 branch's release managers allowed one exception — Nullable Intersection Types RFC — to hold a vote and merge it the vote passes, even after the feature-freeze deadline. The RFC vote turned out negative, and the feature was not merged in.

PHP 8.1 already had six point releases, three alpha releases and three beta releases. This first release-candidate is not suitable to be used in production systems, but it is meant to be used as an early testing environment such as CI/CD systems and local development environments.

This release candidate also means that the development of the PHP 8.1 is now branched off from the main development branch. PHP's source code now has a separate branch named PHP-8.1, that will receive improvements towards the PHP 8.1 releases, and the master branch is the working branch for future improvements that do not make it to PHP 8.1.

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