Modernizing Drupal with PHP 8+

Drupal celebrated its 20th birthday this year. In Drupal 8 and 9, we continued to modernize Drupal, and today, Drupal is a battle-tested, loved, and a modern software embracing mature PHP ecosystem features such as Composer, PSRs, Annotations, and more.

Released Nov 2020, PHP 8.0 is a major leap in PHP. Bringing several new features and syntax improvements that brings PHP as one of the easiest, secure, and feature-rich languages.

Discover how to improve Drupal core, and Drupal-made applications make use the latest features such as Union Types, named parameters, JIT, constructor properties, Opcode-optimizations such as dead-code elimination, etc.

## Scope

This talk will not deep-dive to all features introduced in PHP 8 due to the sheer amount of amazing new changes there. Please refer to:
- PHP 8.0 Release announcement: https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php , https://php.watch/versions/8.0
- DrupalCon EU talk on same subject: https://aye.sh/talk/php8-dceu, https://aye.sh/blog/drupalcon-europe-2020-feedback

Instead of the new features, this talk will focus on practical application of these features with practical examples including ones from Drupal 9.

## Author

Ayesh Karunaratne is the author of PHP.Watch (https://php.watch), where he provides in-depth articles and documents on PHP and latest changes to the language.
- PHP 8.0: https://php.watch/versions/8.0
- 8.1: https://php.watch/versions/8.1
- Enums: https://php.watch/versions/8.1/enums