PHP is one of the most popular programming languages, and one of the reasons for its popularity is its compatibility with other languages. It can also run on all major operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix. PHP works with most standard web servers such as Apache and IIS on Microsoft Windows, and it can be used with Microsoft SQL Server and many other data sources.
PHP 8 is the current PHP version, which was released on November 26, 2020. PHP 8 brings about a lot of new features and improvements that make it stand out from previous versions.
The biggest change in the current PHP version is that it introduces two new JIT engines. In previous versions, the interpreter translates the source code into machine code every time the program is run. But with Just-in-Time compilation, we no longer need to do this translation every time because the compilation occurs only once, during the execution of programs.
JIT (Just-in-Time) Compilation
PHP 8 brings with it the long-awaited JIT (Just-in-time) compiler. This is one of the biggest changes in PHP since its inception and is set to improve PHP’s performance by several orders of magnitude. In fact, some benchmarks suggest that PHP 8 is up to three times faster than PHP 7.4 – which itself was two times faster than PHP 5.6.
The JIT compiler does not compile your whole application but instead focuses on parts of code that are executed multiple times and converts them into machine code at runtime. As a result, you get faster execution as well as less memory consumption for those parts of the code. Since you need only to add one line of code to enable the JIT compiler, there’s little reason not to take advantage of it.
