PHP 8.4: property hooks, lazy objects, and a stronger object model
Dated to 21 November 2024, PHP 8.4 pushed the object model forward with property hooks, asymmetric visibility, and lazy objects.
PHP 8.4 is the kind of release you feel most inside frameworks and domain-heavy applications. It focuses on making stateful objects easier to model without falling back to boilerplate getters, setters, and proxy classes.
The big additions are property hooks, asymmetric property visibility, lazy objects, PDO driver-specific subclasses, and a BCMath object type. The result is code that can expose domain-friendly properties while still enforcing invariants and deferring expensive initialization.
For application teams, that means less ceremony around data access and dependency-heavy models. For library authors, it opens a much cleaner path to APIs that look simple from the outside but stay disciplined under the hood.