Reflections and predictions on how PHP will evolve in 2023, Viktar Barysevich, Head of PHP at Godel Technologies.

What are the biggest trends in PHP you have seen over the past year?

PHP continues to evolve and adapt to meet the changing needs of web development and remains a popular and versatile language for building dynamic web applications.

PHP will hold around 45% of public websites in 2023 (based on Statista public info), making it the most popular programming language, predicts a statistical analysis. Based on a future idea, we see opportunities in developing new features and improving the stability and performance of existing ones.

What new features or releases should we expect from PHP next year?

In 2023, we will say ‘goodbye’ to PHP 8.0 and we expect the general release of PHP 8.3. It seems we will probably have some challenges upgrading to 8.2 or 8.3 – and maybe more difficult than expected.

There are some expected features and improvements for the PHP 8.3 release, including randomizer add-ons, error handling and more.

What is your prediction for where PHP is heading in 2023?

In short, it would be nice to see a new framework in opposite to Laravel, Symfony, etc. It will probably bring more improvements/features for PHP developers how to improve their product in case if this framework can demonstrate incredible innovated ideas.