Just a few days after it was officially announced by the PHP development team, the latest bugfix-only release of PHP 5.6.0 is now available on all servers within our web hosting network.

This is the third-in-a-row Release Candidate version of PHP 5.6.0, which accumulates all bug fixes that have been reported by the large PHP community worldwide.

The latest version boasts a wide range of improvements and brand new features that are aimed at making PHP much safer and easier to work with.

Here is a list of the key new features included in the new release:

– added support for constant scalar expressions – numeric and string literals and/or constants are now allowed in static-value contexts, such as constant and property declarations or default function arguments.

– variadic functions via ‘…’ – the variadic functions can now be implemented through the ‘…’ operator, instead of the func_get_args() function.

– аrgument unpacking via ‘…’ – the аrrays and traversable objects can be unpacked into argument lists when calling functions through the ‘…’ operator.

– exponentiation via ‘**’ – a right associative ** operator and a **= shorthand assignment operator have been added to support exponentiation.

– use function and use const – the use operator now supports importing functions (via the use function construct) and constants (via the use const construct), apart from classes.

– phpdbg – PHP now includes an interactive debugger called phpdbg, which is implemented as a SAPI module.

– default character encoding – the default_charset is now used as the default character set for functions that are encoding-specific, such as htmlspecialchars(). The default value for this setting is UTF-8.

– large file uploads – files larger than 2 gigabytes in size are now supported.

– SSL/TLS improvements – peer verification is enabled by default, support for certificate fingerprint matching is now included, mitigation against TLS renegotiation attacks is activated; many new SSL context options, which allow better control over the protocol/verification settings when using encryption, are included too.

You can see a full list of the new features and functionalities of the new PHP 5.6.0 release here: http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.new-features.php.

All PHP users are encouraged to try out the new version carefully, and to report any bugs in the bug tracking system – https://bugs.php.net/.

The next Release Candidate version of PHP 5.6.0 is expected to be released in mid-August.