PHP 8.1: What's New and Changed

PHP 8.1 is the next major PHP version, up for release on November 2021.

PHP 8.1 will bring Enums, Fibers, never return type, Intersection Types, readonly properties, and more!

New Features

• Enums
• Intersection Types
• Fibers
• never return type
• Readonly Properties
• final class constants
• New fsync and fdatasync functions
• New array_is_list function
• New Sodium XChaCha20 functions
• $_FILES: New full_path value for directory-uploads
• Intl: New IntlDatePatternGenerator class
• GD: AVIF image support
• Phar: Added OpenSSL-256 and OpenSSL-512 signature algorithms
• GD: Lossless WebP encoding support
• Array unpacking support for string-keyed arrays
• Explicit Octal numeral notation
• Hash functions accept algorithm-specific $options
• MurmurHash3 hash algorithm support
• xxHash hash algorithms support
• FPM: Configurable child-process spawn rate
• Curl: DNS-over-HTTPS support
• Curl: File uploads from strings with CURLStringFile
• MySQLi: New MYSQLI_REFRESH_REPLICA constant

Syntax/Functionality Changes

• HTML entity en/decode functions process single quotes and substitute by default
• MySQLi: Default error mode set to exceptions
• CLI: Interactive shell (php -a) requires readline extension
• Phar: Default signature algorithm changed from SHA1 to SHA256
• Configurable line endings for fputcsv and SplFileObject::fputcsv
• version_compare operator restrictions
• Warning on compact function calls with non-string and non-array string parameters
• finfo Extension: file_info resource are migrated to existing finfo objects
• IMAP: imap resources are IMAP\Connection class objects
• FTP Extension: Connection resources are FTP\Connection class objects
• GD Extension: Font identifiers are GdFont class objects
• LDAP: resources migrated to LDAP\Connection, LDAP\Result, and LDAP\ResultEntry objects
• Pspell: pspell, pspell config resources are PSpell\Dictionary, PSpell\Config class objects

Deprecations

• Passing null to non-nullable internal function parameters is deprecated
• Return types in PHP built-in class methods and deprecation notices
• Serializable interface deprecated
• Implicit incompatible float to int conversion is deprecated
• mysqli::get_client_info method and mysqli_get_client_info($param) is deprecated
• date_sunrise, date_sunset functions and related INI settings are deprecated
• mhash*() functions (hash extension) are deprecated
• filter.default and filter.default_options INI settings are deprecated
• PDO::FETCH_SERIALIZE is deprecated
• auto_detect_line_endings INI directive is deprecated
• MySQLi: mysqli_driver->driver_version property is deprecated