PHP has a few functions like md5(), sha1(), and hash(), that can be used to hash a string based on certain algorithms like “sha1”, “sha256”, “md5” etc. 
All functions take a string as an argument and output an Alpha-Numeric hashed string.
 

DrupalVIP technical notebook & support

PHP 8.0 is now EOL

All Drupal sites should start making sure they work with stronger PHP versions,

Drupal 10.x is best working with PHP 8.0 and higher

It would be best if you started planning to move towards PHP 8.2 or 8.3

Massive improvements in terms of both speed and memory usage with new Composer.

The difference depends on your use case, so while I've seen reports of improvements of over 50% to both in some projects, I cannot put an exact number on it.

As a side note to this, require/remove and partial updates are now much faster because Composer will now only load the metadata of the packages which are being changed.

Object interfaces allow you to create code that specifies which methods a class must implement, without having to define how these methods are implemented. Interfaces share a namespace with classes and traits, so they may not use the same name.

Interfaces are defined in the same way as a class, but with the interface keyword replacing the class keyword and without any of the methods having their contents defined.