PHP has been the fourth most popular coding language in the world for seven years straight. More than 200 million websites and around 82% of public websites are powered by PHP.
PHP 7 Released
PHP took a huge leap forward with the release of the first major update since 2004. PHP 7 boasts massively improved performance – up to three times better performance than PHP 5.6 when running WordPress.
PHP 7 boasts other changes as well - return type declarations, reduced memory usage, the spaceship operator and many more.
PHP also features some breaking changes such as the removal of magic quotes and the PHP safe mode as well as a number of new reserved keywords.
Web apps such as WordPress needed a few touches in order to be able to support PHP 7 but now it’s fully compatible with the new programming language.
While PHP 7 has been released very recently, it may take a few years until it’s widely adopted by the majority of websites. Most applications tend to take a few years to adapt to upgrades but we hope that the increased performance will make these upgrades come sooner.
PHP 7 comes with a new and improved version of the Zend Engine, featuring numerous perks such as:
General performance: The new PHP 7 is up to three times as fast as the older version
Zero cost asserts
Anonymous Classes
Return and Scalar Type Declaration
The null coalescing operator
Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
Secure random number generator
Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
Improved Exception hierarchy
Consistent 64 bit support
Abstract Syntax Tree
Memory usage is significantly reduced
