History of PHP

Rasmus releases PHP Tools to the public.

PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as it exists today. Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski of Tel Aviv, Israel, began yet another complete rewrite of the underlying parser in 1997. Approaching Rasmus online, they discussed various aspects of the current implementation and their redevelopment of PHP. In an effort to improve the engine and start building upon PHP/FI's existing user base, Andi, Rasmus, and Zeev decided to collaborate in the development of a new, independent programming language. In June, 1998, with many new developers from around the world joining the effort, PHP 3.0 was announced by the new PHP Development Team as the official successor to PHP/FI 2.0. This entirely new language was released under a new name, that removed the implication of limited personal use that the PHP/FI 2.0 name held. It was renamed simply 'PHP', with the meaning becoming a recursive acronym - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP 4 comes with a brand new "Zend Engine" core developed by Andi and Zeev. In addition to greatly improved performance, PHP 4 included support for more web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, and several new language constructs.

PHP 5 was released in July 2004 after long development and several pre-releases. It is mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new features.

A major language renewal comes with the new Zend Engine 3 (PHPNG), numerous improvements and new features. It's also twice as fast as the previous PHP 5.6 release!

First released in 2020, PHP 8.0 was another major update of the PHP language. It contained many new features and optimizations including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expressions, the nullsafe operator (?->), a new optimizing JIT compiler, and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.