PHP 8.4 Feature-freeze, first Release Candidate released

Published On28 Sep 2024

PHP 8.4-RC1

The first Release Candidate (RC1) of the upcoming PHP 8.4 is now released.

PHP 8.4-RC1 marks an important milestone in the PHP 8.4 release cycle, that PHP 8.4 is now branched off the PHP development branch, and the PHP 8.4 branch is now in a feature-freeze.

From this point forward, the PHP 8.4 branch will only receive bug fixes to prepare for its Generally-Available (GA) release, scheduled for 2024 November 21.

There will be three more Release Candidates (RC2, 3, and 4), followed by the first GA release, PHP 8.4.0.

PHP 8.4 is the first release after the new PHP Release Cycle policy is adopted. PHP 8.4 is slated to receive active support for two years, followed by two years of security updates.

Bringing several major new features including Property Hooks, Asymmetric visibility support, Lazy Objects, Unicode 16 support, improvements, and deprecations, PHP 8.4 marks an important milestone release for PHP.

Note that PHP 8.4 is not yet suitable for production systems. However, PHP 8.4-RC1 Windows binaries are available to download, Docker/OCI images tagged as 8.4-rc on Docker Hub, and pre-built Linux packages are available on Ondrej/Remi repositories.

Guides on compiling PHP on Ubuntu/Debian-based distros and Fedora/RHEL-based systems outline the steps to compile PHP from source too.

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