HHVM 4.5 is released! This release will be supported for 6 weeks, and HHVM 4.1+ remain supported.

This weeks’s release is focused on performance improvements and increased consistency between typechecker and runtime errors.

Highlights

  • Adds Shapes::at(), which is similar to Shapes::idx(), but throws if the field is not set. This is useful for optional fields.

Breaking Changes

  • Dynamic method invocations ($foo->$bar()) and property access ($foo->$bar) now raise a typechecker error unless $foo is dynamic.
  • A typechecker error is now raised for contravariant or covariance in method and function type parameters. This was previously a runtime error.
  • It is now a runtime error to invoke static methods as if they were instance methods (e.g. $foo->someStaticMethod()). This was previously a typechecker error.
  • Deprecation notices are now raised at runtime for invoking instance methods statically. This was previously a typechecker error.

Other Notes

  • Raise a clearer error when the type of a Hack array literal contains typos
  • Improved compatibility with hhbbc and GCC 9.1

Future Changes

  • we plan to remove support for UNSAFE, UNSAFE_BLOCK, and UNSAFE_EXPR comments in a future release, in favor of more explicit HH_FIXME[code] comments and future language features. The behavior of UNSAFE comments can be disabled with the disable_unsafe_expr and disable_unsafe_block options in .hhconfig

New features in HSL-Experimental

HSL-Experimental 4.5.0 adds advanced async helper classes, including Async\Poll and Async\Semaphore among others. We strongly recommend avoiding Async\Poll when alternatives exist.

For details, see the release notes.