PHP 7.3

PHP 7.3 is a release of the PHP language shipped in December 2018, continuing the 7.x series. It focused on small but practical syntax improvements and on performance, without revolutionary architecture changes. It was another stable step in the language's evolution before the release of PHP 7.4.

Why PHP 7.3 mattered

PHP 7.3 introduced a set of convenient improvements for developers:

• flexible heredoc and nowdoc syntax — the ability to indent the closing marker, improving the readability of text blocks;
• trailing commas in function calls — easier to add and remove arguments in version-controlled code;
• the array_key_first and array_key_last functions — quick access to the first and last key of an array;
• improved JSON handling — new error flags that make diagnosing problems easier.

Although the changes were evolutionary, they clearly improved the everyday comfort of writing code and tidied up small annoyances present in earlier versions.

Practical applications

Security support for PHP 7.3 ended in 2021, so today it is an obsolete version. During its active life it was widely used in production as a stable foundation for web applications and online stores. Sites still running on PHP 7.3 should be updated to a supported branch. Modern hosting and VPS servers provide only current PHP releases, and migrating from 7.3 to newer versions usually goes smoothly thanks to the high degree of syntax compatibility.

The value of small improvements

PHP 7.3 is a good illustration that a language's evolution need not rely solely on spectacular new features. Seemingly cosmetic changes, such as flexible heredoc or trailing commas in argument lists, genuinely improved code readability and reduced needless diffs in version-control systems. For teams maintaining large projects, it is exactly these improvements that translated into everyday convenience and fewer small bugs.