Before Christmas, the latest stable releases of PHP were released for the 5.4 and 5.3 branches – 5.4.10 and 5.3.20 – but there is also the latest alpha release – 5.5.0 Alpha 2, following on from the Alpha 1 release in November.
Version 5.5.0 is a development preview, and should not be deployed to a live production environment. The main changes are:
- Support for using empty() on the result of function calls and other expressions,
- Systemtap support by enabling systemtap compatible dtrace probes on linux,
- Optimized access to temporary and compiled VM variables. 8% less memory reads.
Note: this alpha version also introduces the depreciation of the original mysql extension, starting the switch over to either mysqli or PDO MySQL instead.
A full list of changes can be found on github here:
