The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0. This release marks the start of the new major PHP 7 series.
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