PHP 8.1: What's New and Changed

PHP 8.1 is currently in active development, and it will be released towards the end of year 2021.

New Features

• Enums
• never return type
• Fibers
• New fsync and fdatasync functions
• New array_is_list function
• New Sodium XChaCha20 functions
• $_FILES: New full_path value for directory-uploads
• 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
• CLI: Interactive shell (php -a) requires readline extension
• MySQLi: Default error mode set to exceptions
• 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
• MySQLi: mysqli_driver->driver_version property is deprecated