At the time of writing, PHP 8.6 GA is expected November 19 2025. The first alpha is expected July 02 2026. PHP 8.5 tracking issue: PHP 8.5 release tracking #1980 More on github.com

So: min($max, max($min, $value)); More on reddit.com

JIT is important, but it's not user facing, you don't need to know anything about it. This and other major performance improvements you get for free just by using the new runtime. Other major runtime improvements are a selection of high quality "runner" style runtimes, where the same process is handling many requests, like Swoole. The biggest language improvements are probably a way more robust type system and attributes. This lead to a bunch of new high quality tools to be able to massage your codebase in many automated and semi automated ways. But, by far the biggest change is the ecosystem. For one, Composer is the single tool to have saved PHP IMO. The fact we now just take it for granted is pretty telling. Then, you have a rise of several very high quality batteries included frameworks: Symfony and Laravel. Productivity using these frameworks is very high, resulting in many many high quality frameworks and products built on top, ready to use. Also, there's a mind shift with focus on quality. Now projects by default all do tests with PHPUnit, code style with CS Fixer, but also static analysis with PHPStan and Psalm. More advanced projects also do other stuff like mutation testing with Infection. There's a very clear focus on quality over basically the entire ecosystem, meaning you can expect stability. Overall, I'd say just start building and you'll catch up soon enough. More on reddit.com

I'd call what you have some excellent skills. Legacy code would be difficult for a lot of folks to manage. I would deffo augment your skillset with the latest and greatest simply for your own benefit. There's a lot of great additions and it gets better with every release. OOP is excellent, it's allowed me to keep my sanity by abstracting away garbage code at work into something tangible, reusable and clean. I've published my own composer packages and it's a world of difference having the ability to write some code, test it, publish it, install it as a dependency and never have to worry about it again for the most part. It's helped me reduce project's metal overhead, strengthen my coding standards allow others to benefit from my designs. The main difference is heavy reliance on OOP and strong type enforcement. Basically designing things so they less susceptible to errors, and more robustly designed systems overall. The toolsets and composer libraries are amazing. Lots of reliance on shell commands to generate code, run tests, compile assets, lint code etc. Everything is streamlined once you've gotten familiar with the tools you can use. I love Laravel because they give you a complete ecosystem to work with. I get the Dev Server, Asset Compiler, Framework, and Paid Services if I want them. They've made it really easy to write and deploy modern PHP. My job used to be a headache and now it's very smooth sailing thanks to Laravel. More on reddit.com