Following the recent release of PHP 7.3, Colin O'Dell has put together a guide for those wanting to install it, walking you through the setup for several popular operating systems.

PHP 7.3 has been released, bringing some great new features to the language such as trailing commas in function calls, throwing errors when JSON parsing fails, array_key_first() / array_key_last() functions, and much more!

In the post he includes instructions for:

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• CentOS / RHEL & Fedora
• Mac OS X
• Windows

He even includes instructions for two other tool-based installations: phpbrew and Docker.

On the main PHP.net site they've announced the first stable release in the PHP 7.3.x series: PHP 7.3.0!

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.3.0. This release marks the third feature update to the PHP 7 series.

PHP 7.3.0 comes with numerous improvements and new features such as:

• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntax
• PCRE2 Migration
• Multiple MBString Improvements
• LDAP Controls Support
• Improved FPM Logging
• Windows File Deletion Improvements
• Several Deprecations

You can find out more information about these features and view the Changelog for this release from the announcement. As always, you can download this latest release from either the main downloads page or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries. If you need more information on moving to this new release, check out the migration guide.

Phoronix has a new post to their blog sharing some benchmark results for PHP 7.3, the next major language release, and things are looking positive!

Released on Thursday was PHP 7.3 RC6 as the last planned pre-release for the upcoming PHP 7.3. Here are some benchmarks looking at the PHP 7.3 performance compared to PHP releases going back to the v5.5 series on a Linux server.

[...] I ran some fresh benchmarks over the past day on PHP 5.5.38, PHP 5.6.38, PHP 7.0.32, PHP 7.1.24, PHP 7.2.12, and the PHP 7.3.0-RC6 test release. [...] PHP 7.3 is just shy of 10% faster than PHP 7.2 in the popular PHPBench. PHP 7.3 is 31% faster than PHP 7.0 or nearly 3x the speed of PHP5.

The post includes more benchmarks that reinforce this same trend with both the Zend performance testing and their own testing framework.

Overall, PHP 7.3 is shaping up to be another notable upgrade to the PHP7 series for its continued performance improvements, the new PHP FFI interface, and other new additions for this PHP release due out in early December.

As announced on the main PHP.net site, several new versions of the language have been released including one for the upcoming PHP 7.3.x series:

• PHP 7.1.24
• PHP 7.2.12
• PHP 7.3.0RC5

The v7.1 and v7.2 releases are bugfix releases and include changes in core functionality, date handling, FTP, Tidy and XML.

The PHP 7.3.0RC5 release is the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 7.3.x series. If all goes well and no major issues come up, the next step in the release process is to officially branch the 7.3.0 release and have one more Release Candidate (6) before a GA release.

As always you can download the bugfix releases from the downloads section (or windows.php.net) and the Release Candidate from the QA site (or windows.php.net/qa). Bugs found should be reported via the PHP bug tracking system.

On the PHP.net site they've posted the announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 7.3.x series: PHP 7.3.0RC4

The PHP team is glad to announce the next PHP 7.3.0 pre-release, PHP 7.3.0RC4. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki.

[...] For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. Internal changes are listed in the UPGRADING.INTERNALS file. These files can also be found in the release archive.

As always, testing of this preview release (not intended for use in production) is appreciated and any bugs found should be reported. The source download can be grabbed from this download page and the Windows binaries are over on the Windows QA site.

The main PHP.net site has posted the announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 7.3.0 series: PHP 7.3.0RC3.

The PHP team is glad to announce the next PHP 7.3.0 pre-release, PHP 7.3.0RC3. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki.

For source downloads of PHP 7.3.0RC3 please visit the download page. Windows sources and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/.

For more information on what changed and how to migrate to this new version, check out the NEWS and UPGRADING files respectively. The next release would be RC4, planned for October 25th.

The php[architect] podcast, hosted by Eric van Johnson and John Congdon, has posted their latest episode: Episode #13 - PHP 7.3.

Fresh off of hosting WavePHP in San Diego, Eric van Johnson and John Congdon put the finishing touches on the latest episode. Eric and John talk about stickers, forthcoming PHP 7.3 improvements like garbage collection, how to make estimates, penetration testing for security, job hunting, and more.

Sammy Kaye Powers joins to discuss podcasting, swing dancing, and challenges when upgrading legacy applications.

They also give some reasons why you should update to PHP 7.3 (when it's released), deprecated features, and a preview of what might be added in PHP 8. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get updates when new shows are released.

If you're looking for a good summary of what's coming up in the next major version of PHP (v7.3), look no further than this new post from the Cloudways blog.

PHP is surely giving a tough competition to other scripting languages, thanks to the developers for the rapid updates they unleash from time to time. [...] In the series of these updates, PHP recently has got another milestone with the release of RC1 of PHP 7.3. The version also got some new much-needed updates. While the official release date of PHP 7.3 is given of late December 2018.

In this blog, I will discuss newly introduced PHP 7.3 features and updates.

The post then goes through several of the improvements and new features, providing code examples and descriptions for:

• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntaxes
• the PCRE2 Migration
• is_countable function
• Argon2 Password Hash Enhancements
• Same Site Cookie

...just to name a few. There are several others included in the post as well. While PHP 7.3 hasn't been released as a final version yet, you can test these changes out via the current release candidate in your development: PHP 7.3.0RC2. Additionally, more information about the RFCs - including those that weren't accepted - can be found on the PHP wiki.

On the main PHP.net site, they've posted the announcement of the release of the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 7.3.0 version: PHP 7.3.0.RC2.

The PHP team is glad to announce the next PHP 7.3.0 pre-release, PHP 7.3.0RC2. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki.

[...] For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. Internal changes are listed in the UPGRADING.INTERNALS file. These files can also be found in the release archive.

As with other preview releases you can download this version from the QA site for source packages and the Windows QA site for the Windows binaries.

On the php[architect] site they've shared another article from their September 2018 issue. In this new article author Damien Seguy looks forward to PHP 7.3 and covers some of the new features that come with it.

PHP 7.3 successfully passed the “feature freeze” deadline. On Aug. 1st, 2018 all features for PHP 7.3 were identified. This triggered the first PHP 7.3 beta, on the following day, and, from there, we’ll reach RC in September. It is time to review what this new PHP version has available for us, help test PHP 7.3, and get ready.

He goes through several of the changes coming including:

• Improved Garbage Collector
• Relaxed Heredoc/Nowdoc
• Trailing Comma for Calls
• Deprecated Case-insensitive Constants
• PCRE 2.0
• SQLite 3.24
• Json_encode May Throw Exceptions
• array_first_key(), array_last_key()
• list() with References
• is_countable()
• net_get_interfaces()
• Removing image2wbmp()
• assert() is Now a Reserved Function
• Continue for Loops, Break for Switch
• Monotonic Timer: hrtime()
• compact() Reports Undefined Variables

For each of the items listed, there's a brief explanation of what the feature is and some code to show it in action. The tutorial ends with a listing of some things you can do to prepare your current codebase to work with PHP 7.3 ahead of the December 13th release date.