On November 25, 2021, a major update of the PHP 8.1 was released. The release contains many improvements and new features, which significantly influenced the work of the projects created using PHP. However, first things first.

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Among the updates in PHP 8.1, the following of them are worth taking into account:

• Enumerations. A significant improvement of version 8.1, the essence of this is the ability to use enumeration instead of the class with constants, which allows you to validate the enumeration at runtime;


• Fibers. Fibers are lightweight code blocks that allow you to create started, suspended, and terminated code blocks. Also, the ability to manage these threads at a low level is added. First of all, the revision concerns the AMPHP and ReactPHP frameworks;


• Readonly properties. Now, the properties of a class can be marked as read-only, which means the information they contain can be written once, and they can't be changed after initialization. These properties are especially actual for implementing VO and DTO objects;


• New in initializers. It allows you to use the keyword new in initializers. It can be applied as an option by default or a value of static variables or in attribute arguments;


• Improved performance. Due to optimization of functions, improving iterators and speeding up class name resolution and opcache improvement – the ability to cache relationships between classes, productivity increased by about 8%.

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PHP 8.1 and Stimulsoft products

The PHP update affected, first of all, our Reports.PHP and Dashboards.PHP products and only the server-side of these products. We have tested the work of Stimulsoft report generators under PHP 8.1 and haven't found compatibility issues.
You can find the latest version of Stimulsoft products here.