Software Update: Official Release PHP 4.1.0

Hans informed us that PHP 4.1.0 was released today, and this time it is the official release . The developers promise, among other things, a greatly improved performance, especially under Windows. Furthermore, a large number of bug fixes and new functions have been added. The page with the release notes and the changelog is about two kilometers long and I will therefore omit it, but I would recommend any active PHP devver to this fabric to take in:

After a lengthy QA process, PHP 4.1.0 is finally out. Download at †

PHP 4.1.0 includes several other key improvements:
• A new input interface for improved security (read below)
• Highly improved performance in general
• Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows. The multithreaded server modules under Windows (ISAPI, Apache, etc.) perform as much as 30 times faster under load! We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows.
• Versioning support for extensions. Right now it’s barely being used, but the infrastructure was put in place to support separate version numbers for different extensions. The negative side effect is that loading extensions that were built against old versions of PHP will now result in a crash, instead of in a nice clear message. Make sure you only use extensions built with PHP 4.1.0.
• Turn-key output compression support
• *LOTS* of fixes and new functions

As some of you may notice, this version is quite historical, as it’s the first time in history we actually incremented the middle digit! The two key reasons for this unprecedented change were the new input interface, and the broken binary compatibility of modules due to the versioning support.