PHP 8.4: Property Hooks, Asymmetric Visibility and More

PHP 8.4.0 was released on 21 November 2024 and remains a supported branch today (its latest security release, 8.4.27, fixes PHP2Shell). Key additions:

• Property hooks – define get / set logic directly on a property, removing much getter/setter boilerplate.
• Asymmetric visibility – e.g. public private(set) string $name; lets a property be publicly readable but only privately writable.
• #[\Deprecated] attribute – mark your own functions, methods and constants as deprecated with native engine warnings.
• New array functions – array_find(), array_find_key(), array_any() and array_all().
• new without parentheses – new MyClass()->method() now works without wrapping parentheses.
• Lazy objects support in the engine and a new DOM API with HTML5 parsing.

The release also deprecates implicitly nullable parameter types (function f(Type $x = null)), a change that produces deprecation notices in many older codebases.

Source: php.net PHP 8.4 announcement

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