PHP 7 was officially released yesterday! it’s been in testing for quite some time. 8 release candidates were released to find any bugs and fix them now that’s been completed it’s now available for everyone to download and use.
I’m incredibly excited to take advantage of the speed improvements, hopefully most hosts will have this available very soon!
I want to say a massive congratulations and thank you to the PHP team and the contributors this is an amazing effort on their part!
See PHP’s announcement on PHP 7
PHP 7.0.0 comes with a new version of the Zend Engine, numerous improvements and new features such as
- Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
- Significantly reduced memory usage
- Abstract Syntax Tree
- Consistent 64-bit support
- Improved Exception hierarchy
- Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
- Secure random number generator
- Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
- The null coalescing operator (??)
- Return and Scalar Type Declarations
- Anonymous Classes
- Zero cost asserts
To get up to speed quickly I recommend reading through Colin O’Dell’s PHP Upgrade Guide, This book covers all of the new features coming in PHP 7, as well as breaking changes and "gotchas" to watch out for. You'll learn how to take advantage of these changes and get started with PHP today.
This book is for PHP developers looking to jump into PHP 7. You'll need previous experience with PHP in order to understand the topics and examples we'll cover. The more you know about PHP 5 and OOP, the more you'll understand why some of the changes are important and how they'll impact your development.
If you're a manager or leader of a team looking to work in PHP 7, this book will help your developers quickly catch up on all the changes they need to know about, and even expose some new features they can take advantage of for faster, better development.
