The name for the next major PHP version has been finalized! The winning proposal is to call the latest major version PHP 7.
With the
planned date for PHP 7’s release rapidly approaching, the internals group is
hard at work trying to fix our beloved language as much as possible by both
removing artifacts and adding some long desired features.
The latest PHP version will be released later this year
The PHP 7
Timeline RFC was approved in a near unanimous vote, and aims to release PHP 7
in October 2015.
Time line
PHP Space Ships
PHP 7 will
introduce a new operator <=> conveniently
Add a new
operator
(expr)
<=> (expr),
it returns 0 if both operands are equal, 1 if the left is greater, and -1 if
the right is greater. It uses exactly the same comparison rules as used by our
existing comparison operators: <,
<=, ==, >=
and >.Return Type Declarations & Scalar Type Hints
PHP 7 will allow developers to declare what kind of return type a function is expected to have – similar to argument Type Hints.
In addition, argument type hints and the new return-type declarations now support new scalar types, allowing developers to denote that they’re expecting strings, floats, ints or bools to be passed or returned
PHP 7 Performance
PHP 7 is
based on the PHPNG project (PHP Next-Gen), that was led by Zend to speed up PHP
applications.
PHP 7 is 2X faster
Since PHPNG
was open sourced and later merged into PHP 7, its performance more than doubled
in many cases, and we’re continuing to improve it all the time.
What is PHPNG
phpng's key
benefits are around performance and memory utilization. Detailed performance
benchmarks against previous (and current) versions of PHP, as well as hhvm,
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/phpng (read more)
What is hhvm
HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed
for executing programs written in Hack and PHP. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation
approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the development
flexibility that PHP provides.
