HHVM 4.96 is released! This release marks the end of support for 4.88; HHVM 4.91–4.95 remain supported, as do the 4.56 and 4.80 LTS releases.

(Note: HHVM 4.89 and 4.90 were skipped.)

Highlights

  • Improved automatic inference of lambda parameter types when dealing with mixed or dynamic (examples).

Breaking Changes

  • The built-in functions assert and assert_options were removed. Using them had already been a typechecker error, but previously wouldn’t fail at runtime.
  • Using an arithmetic operator (+, *, etc.) on an array now throws an InvalidOperationException (which can be caught) instead of a fatal error.
  • Fixed a bug that would allow a context constant with the same name to be declared twice. This may reveal new type errors.
  • The INI option hhvm.forbid_dynamic_calls_to_meth_caller was renamed to hhvm.dynamic_meth_caller_level.
    • Its behavior is unchanged, it will raise a warning (if set to 1) or throw (2) when dynamic_meth_caller is called on a static method or a method not marked as <<__DynamicallyCallable>>.

Future Changes

  • Using meth_caller with arguments that are not string/::class literals will become a fatal error at runtime (it is already a typechecker error).
    • The future behavior can be enabled now using the INI option hhvm.hack.lang.disallow_dynamic_meth_caller_args.
    • dynamic_meth_caller can be used with non-literal arguments, but it can only invoke methods annotated with <<__DynamicallyCallable>> (currently might not be enforced based on the value of hhvm.dynamic_meth_caller_level, as described above).