HHVM 4.44 is released! HHVM 4.38–4.43 remain supported, as do the 4.8 and 4.32 LTS releases.

Breaking Changes

• the __Deprecated attribute is no longer permitted on any types, such as classes, enums, or type aliases; it had no effect in these positions.
• (int) NAN is now consistently the minimum 64-bit signed integer, instead of
  1. In previous releases, this behavior could differ at runtime compared to when constant-folding.
• square bracket literals for PHP arrays (e.g. ['foo', 'bar']) are now a parse error. array() is still supported, but will be removed in the near future. Ideally, use vec/dict/keyset instead, but varray and darray remain supported.

Future Changes

• comparison operations (e.g. <, <=, <=> etc) will be changed to throw when a PHP array is compared with a non-array. This operation currently raises a typechecker error, and raises a notice if hhvm.hack_arr_compat_notices=true and hhvm.hack_arr_compat_check_compare_non_any_array=true INI options are set. The behavior of !==, and === will not change.
• array_key_exists() will change to throw an exception if the specified key is null. A notice is raised if the hhvm.hack_arr_compat_check_null_hack_array_key=true and hhvm.hack_arr_compat_notices=true INI options are set.
• lambda type inference is being changed in the next release; the new behavior can be enabled now with the new_inference_lambda=true .hhconfig setting; this can lead to the detection of additional type errors (example below)
• string casts of Stringish objects will change to raise a runtime exception; the hhvm.notice_on_implicit_invoke_to_string option can be used to detect this.
  • this includes both explicit (string) casts, and various forms of implicit casting (e.g. concatenation, comparisons, printfs, and interpolation); searching for (string) will not find all problematic code.
• empty switch blocks ( switch ($foo) { /* empty */ }) will become a parse error.
• array() literals will be removed; use vec/dict/keyset instead if possible, otherwise varray or darray.

New lambda inference

If the type can not be inferred in a usable way, the typechecker will now raise an error instead of assuming the behavior is safe.

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function just_return_it<T>((function(T): void) $f):(function(T): void) {
  return $f;
}

function break_it():void {
  // No error here
  $g = just_return_it($y ==> $y->this_method_does_not_exist());
  // Can even try and invoke it on a string
  $g('ohno');
}