Each version of Drupal brings in new changes. And the changes coming to Drupal Core are easier to be made, thanks to semantic versioning! It is easier to get a new experimental module/theme in core and work towards getting it stable and production ready.

While a lot of such user-facing development happens with each release, there are also a lot of under-the-hood improvements that happen as well. One of the major changes is keeping up with the releases of the dependent projects. This session focuses on PHP and its release cycle. We will talk about:

1. We will discuss in detail some exciting features of different versions of PHP 8 (8.1, 8.2, 8.3) bring and share some examples. This will include things like the JIT compiler, strict type hinting, constructor property promotion, attributes, Enums, disallowing dynamic properties for objects.
2. PHP version requirement with each version of Drupal core. E.g. For Drupal 10 the PHP version required is 8.1. Drupal 11 will require PHP 8.3
3. How Drupal core, and related projects (e.g. Symfony) keeps up with the version updates (while keeping backwards compatibility when required).
4. How can you use them in your contributed or custom code.

Intended audience — developers with some knowledge of writing custom code with PHP.

Takeaway — understanding of new exciting PHP 8 features implemented in Drupal core and how to implement them in your code.