The first alpha release of PHP 8.5 was issued last week in kicking off the release cycle in working toward the official PHP 8.5.0 release later in the year.

Some of the changes to be found with the PHP 8.5 Alpha 1 development release include:

- Support for Closures and first-class callables in constant expressions.

- Support for backtraces on fatal errors.

- Adding the #[\NoDiscard] attribute to indicate a function's return value is important and should be consumed.

- Support for a (void) cast to indicate that not using a value is intentional.

- Support for casts in constant expressions.

- Added the pipe operator.

- Added array_first() and array_last().

- The PHP CLI binary now supports the "--ini=diff" option to print INI settings changed from the built-in default PHP settings.

PHP 8.5 is working its way toward the stable release in late November while until then will be multiple alpha and beta releases along with a few release candidates throughout October and November.

Downloads and more details on the PHP 8.5 Alpha 1 release via PHP.net .