The upcoming release of PHP 8 is expected to bring several exciting features, including constructor property promotion, which removes boilerplate code by allowing properties and set them in one place instead of three; union types, which provide a measure of type safety in situations where legacy code has deemed it impossible to receive or return a single type; attributes, which are a formalized standard way to add metadata to PHP code, parsed by the PHP engine and available in reflection; string functions, including `str_contains`, `str_starts_with` and `str_ends_with`, which provide a solid upgrade for developers; and the Stringable interface, which allows you to type on something that is castable to a string via the `__toString` magic method. These features are expected to improve the overall development experience and bring more consistency and type safety to PHP code.