Backend Development 3 min read

HHVM 4.98 Release: New Features, Major Changes, and Upcoming Deprecations

HHVM 4.98 has been officially released, ending support for version 4.92 while continuing maintenance for 4.93‑4.97 and LTS releases, introducing minor typechecker improvements, new error detection for conflicting constants, and outlining future deprecations such as the inst_meth function and stricter string concatenation rules.

Laravel Tech Community
Laravel Tech Community
Laravel Tech Community
HHVM 4.98 Release: New Features, Major Changes, and Upcoming Deprecations

HHVM 4.98 is officially released, marking the end of support for version 4.92. Versions 4.93–4.97, as well as the 4.56 and 4.80 LTS releases, will continue to receive maintenance.

HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) is an open‑source virtual machine developed by Facebook, with its source code hosted on GitHub. Since version 4.0, HHVM no longer supports the PHP language.

Highlights

Minor improvements to various typechecker error messages.

Major Changes

The typechecker now correctly reports errors when a class inherits multiple conflicting definitions of the same non‑abstract constant from its parent class, interface, or trait. These were previously runtime errors that the typechecker could not detect.

Future Changes

We plan to remove the built‑in function inst_meth in a future version (use anonymous functions or meth_caller instead). The .hhconfig flag disallow_inst_meth=true and the INI option hhvm.hack.lang.disallow_inst_meth=true can be used to enforce this behavior now.

String concatenation ( 'hello '.$name ) and interpolation ( "hello $name" ) will be limited to string and int values in the future. This release adds a runtime (INI) option hhvm.notice_on_coerce_for_str_concat that can emit a notice (value 1 ) or throw an InvalidOperationException (value 2 ) when other types are concatenated or interpolated.

backend developmentHHVMHackRuntime ConfigurationTypechecker
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