The PHP Development Team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.0. This new version release comes with new features, some backward incompatible changes and many improvements.

The main features of PHP 5.6.0 include:

For a full list of new features, you may read the new features chapter of the migration guide.

PHP 5.6.0 also introduces changes that affect compatibility:

  • Array keys won’t be overwritten when defining an array as a property of a class via an array literal.
  • json_decode() is more strict in JSON syntax parsing.
  • Stream wrappers now verify peer certificates and host names by default when using SSL/TLS.
  • GMP resources are now objects.
  • Mcrypt functions now require valid keys and IVs.

For users upgrading from PHP 5.5, a full migration guide is available, detailing the changes between 5.5 and 5.6.0.