HHVM 4.76 is released! This release marks the end of support for 4.69; HHVM 4.71–4.75 remain supported (4.70 was skipped), as do the 4.32 and 4.56 LTS releases.

Highlights

• The typechecker now allows method calls on generic types with multiple upper bounds, as long as the method call is valid for all of them (example). Previously, it was an error if the method declarations weren’t identical on all of the upper bound types.
• The typechecker now more accurately tracks the types of all local variables when dealing with nested try/catch/finally blocks (examples). This allows some programs to typecheck that previously would have failed.

Breaking Changes

• $GLOBALS was removed. Global variables can still be accessed using the following functions:
  • HH\global_get
  • HH\global_isset
  • HH\global_key_exists
  • HH\global_set
  • HH\global_unset
• The typechecker now reports an error if a trait with any final methods is included multiple times in the same class (this can happen e.g. if the trait is used from a class as well as its parent class). Previously, this caused a runtime error but wasn’t caught by the typechecker.
• Fixed some loopholes that allowed assigning a value to a variable named $this. In almost all cases, it had already been banned by both the typechecker and the runtime, but there were some remaining edge cases:
  • catch (Exception $this)
  • calling a function with inout $this as an argument
  • unset($this)
• ?enum {...} is no longer a valid XHP attribute type. Use enum {...} instead, which is equivalent (XHP attributes are nullable unless declared as @required).
• Using $$ (special variable inside a pipe expression) as an inout argument now raises a fatal error at runtime. It had already been a typechecker error.