thePHP.cc: Why PHP 7.2 Is Important

On thePHP.cc site there's a post that talks about an upcoming PHP release, PHP 7.2, and why it's important despite it not having any amazing new features or too much in the way of major changes. There are a few things they mention, however, that make it seem a lot less boring.

A while ago, Sebastian said in a presentation that "PHP 7.2 will be a boring release". What he meant by that is that PHP 7.2 does not have an awful lot of fancy new features. Okay, adding the sodium extension to PHP's standard distribution is great, but the majority of PHP developers do not have to deal with cryptography in PHP on a daily basis.

[...] We are not so sure anymore that PHP 7.2 really is a boring release. As with every release in the 7 series, PHP keeps getting faster and faster. [...] The PHP core developers, again, did a great job cleaning up some more sins of the past. [...] Along with the cleanups that were already done, quite a few things have been deprecated in PHP 7.2, which schedules them for removal in PHP 8.

They talk about some of the changes coming with PHP 7.2 including the addition of libsodium support, smaller changes to variable handling and what's being done to prepare the language for the next major version, PHP 8. They also remind their readers that no version of PHP 5 - even 5.6 - is supported any longer (just security fixes now) and all current users of the language should upgrade to PHP 7.0+ immediately.