If you're looking for a good summary of what's coming up in the next major version of PHP (v7.3), look no further than this new post from the Cloudways blog.

PHP is surely giving a tough competition to other scripting languages, thanks to the developers for the rapid updates they unleash from time to time. [...] In the series of these updates, PHP recently has got another milestone with the release of RC1 of PHP 7.3. The version also got some new much-needed updates. While the official release date of PHP 7.3 is given of late December 2018.

In this blog, I will discuss newly introduced PHP 7.3 features and updates.

The post then goes through several of the improvements and new features, providing code examples and descriptions for:

• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntaxes
• the PCRE2 Migration
• is_countable function
• Argon2 Password Hash Enhancements
• Same Site Cookie

...just to name a few. There are several others included in the post as well. While PHP 7.3 hasn't been released as a final version yet, you can test these changes out via the current release candidate in your development: PHP 7.3.0RC2. Additionally, more information about the RFCs - including those that weren't accepted - can be found on the PHP wiki.