16 November 2012, 12:13

Development of PHP 5.5 begins

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The release of a first alpha of PHP 5.5 marks the official beginning of the 5.5.0 release cycle for the scripting language's next major version. PHP 5.5 also marks the end of support for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

Major new features in the release include support for generators, a new password-hashing API, the use of the finally instruction in try/catch blocks, support for list() in the foreach loop, constant dereferencing of arrays and strings, and code revisions of ext and intl.

The project's developers have asked PHP users to test the current development state and report any bugs they find. They have invited everyone to submit requests for comments (RFCs). As the project has used the Git version control system since September 2011, anyone can also submit patches.

PHP alpha packages for the currently supported Windows versions can be found on the PHP web site; source code is also available. A complete list of changes can be found in the NEWS file for the first alpha. PHP is released under the PHP License v3.01. The currently supported stable releases of PHP are versions 5.4.8 and 5.3.18.

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