HHVM 4.71 is released! This release marks the end of support for 4.64; HHVM 4.65–4.69 remain supported, as do the 4.32 and 4.56 LTS releases.

Highlights

• The console output of hh_client has been significantly improved, with better color highlighting, error messages shown in a better order, smarter handling of overlapping positions, added surrounding lines of code, and other improvements.
  • hh_client --error-format ... can be used to switch between the different output formats.
• Building HHVM from source should be easier now, and the source packages are much smaller, due to the removal of multiple large “submodules” like Boost and MySQL (these are now downloaded as needed, e.g. if the system version is too old).

Breaking Changes

• The built-in function is_array() was removed from the typechecker and will soon be removed completely. Instead, use one of the following:
  • HH\is_php_array() accepts only legacy arrays (varray, darray). This is equivalent to is_array(), so it guarantees no change in behavior, but makes it harder to migrate from legacy arrays to Hack arrays in the future.
  • HH\is_any_array() accepts legacy array types (varray, darray) as well as Hack arrays (vec, dict, keyset). This makes any future migration from legacy arrays to Hack arrays safer, but it is not equivalent to is_array(), so the change may need some manual review and testing.
  • HH\is_vec_or_varray() and HH\is_dict_or_darray() allow you to test for vec/dict-like behavior, while still making it safe to migrate from legacy arrays to Hack arrays in the future.
  • For code that doesn’t care about the exact container type, consider using a more generic interface, e.g. $var is Container<_> or $var is KeyedContainer<_, _>.
• HHVM no longer parses PHP files (files with the .php extension starting with <?php instead of <?hh). The typechecker ignores them (making it possible for Hack and PHP code to live in the same repository), while the runtime and some other commands (e.g. hh_parse) will raise errors when trying to process them.
  • HHVM hasn’t supported PHP since HHVM 4.0, but until now the behavior for PHP files was inconsistent and could depend on whether they happened to contain valid Hack code or not.
• The typechecker will now complain about incorrect mode (e.g. <?hh // struct) even when the --disable-modes flag is used.
• Fixed a bug where the typechecker would not detect a missing generic type parameter in a var-args function declaration (class A<T> {}, function test(A ...$a): void {}). This may reveal previously undetected errors.
• Fixed a bug where isset would return an incorrect value when used with dict or keyset elements (isset($dict['key'])).

Future Changes

• The is_array() function will also be removed from the runtime (currently, it has only been removed from the typechecker).