PHP 8.5.0 RC2 released
Volker Dusch has announced the release of the second release candidate for PHP 8.5.0, a highly popular and versatile general-purpose scripting language particularly well-suited for web development. With its remarkable speed, flexibility, and practicality, PHP powers everything from simple blogs to some of the world's most visited websites.
The upcoming version of PHP boasts a range of enhancements that promise to significantly improve the overall performance and stability of the platform. Key among these is the fixing of several critical bugs and issues reported by users in GitHub. The core of PHP has been strengthened with fixes such as the resolution of OSS-Fuzz issue #447521098, which led to a fatal error during sccp shift evaluation.
Moreover, the bug GH-20002 affecting BSD builds with MSAN has been fixed, ensuring seamless compilation on various platforms. Another significant enhancement is the restoration of __sleep() and __wakeup() functions, which have been made soft-deprecated instead of being completely deprecated as previously planned.
The Command-Line Interface (CLI) server has also received attention, with a correction implemented to prevent useless "Failed to poll event" error logs due to EAGAIN when PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS is enabled. Improvements have also been made to the BcMath module, specifically in handling the power of 0 of a BcMath number, which could potentially lead to undefined behavior.
The Opcache feature has been significantly enhanced with fixes for potential segfaults and double-frees that could occur due to various warning conditions. These include issues related to NaN (Not-a-Number) to boolean conversions, as well as persistent script warnings during file persistence.
Furthermore, the SOAP module has seen a critical bug fix that prevented SIGSEGV (Signal 11) errors resulting from an uninitialized soap_globals->lang_en variable. Other notable improvements include fixes for array splicing while violating copy-on-write flags and URI issues related to parsing relative URLs against base URLs with query or fragment components.
In addition, the normalization of paths starting with two slashes has been corrected in Uri\Rfc3986\Uri. These enhancements collectively demonstrate a significant effort by the PHP development team to improve the reliability, security, and performance of the platform.
For those interested in trying out this release candidate, please note that additional information and download links can be found on the GitHub page for PHP 8.5.0:
php-8.5.0RC2
Tag for php-8.5.0RC2
