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The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.6. This releases fix over 20 bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.6.
For source downloads of PHP 5.4.6 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.
The key features of PHP 5.4.x include:
- New language syntax including Traits, shortened array syntax and more
- Improved performance and reduced memory consumption
- Support for multibyte languages now available in all builds of PHP at the flip of a runtime switch
- Built-in webserver in CLI mode to simplify development workflows and testing
- Cleaner code base thanks to the removal of multiple deprecated language features
- Many more improvements and fixes
Changes that affect compatibility:
- Register globals, magic quotes and safe mode were removed
- The break/continue $var syntax was removed
- The ini option allow_call_time_pass_reference was removed
- The PHP default_charset is now "UTF-8"
Extensions moved to PECL:
- ext/sqlite (ext/sqlite3 and ext/pdo_sqlite are not affected)
PHP 5.4 series will be the last versions to support Windows XP and Windows 2003. We will not provide binary packages for these Windows versions anymore after PHP 5.4.
For users upgrading from PHP 5.3 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.4.x.
For a full list of changes in PHP 5.4.x, see the ChangeLog.