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PHP 7.0 Nearing Release, Performance Almost As Good As HHVM

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

An anonymous reader writes: PHP 7.0 RC2 was released on Friday. In addition to the new language features, PHP 7.0 is advertised as having twice the performance of PHP 5. Benchmarks of PHP 7.0 RC2 show that these performance claims are indeed accurate, and just not for popular PHP programs like WordPress. In tests done by Phoronix, the PHP performance was 2~2.5x faster all while consuming less memory than PHP 5.3~5.6. Facebook's HHVM implementation meanwhile still held a small performance lead, though it was consuming much more memory. PHP 7.0 is scheduled to be released in November.

4 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My take on your post is that 1) you caught a glimpse of one or two tiresome platitudes regarding PHP and decided to try play the solidarity card, but 2) you don't do any developing at all because you don't know programming, and 3) you don't do any hosting of any kind, because you don't know anything about that either.

  2. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://githut.info/

    Nope. Not relevant at all.

  3. Re: faster php? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A lot of the language is just a thin wrapper around various libraries, which is why so many functions are like that. Newer functions and classes are much cleaner, but there is a bunch of old junk still in there for compatability.

    Used properly it is a nice language. Unfortunately most people don't bother to really learn it and just copy and paste code. A big flaw in the language is that it let's you get away with really awful code.

  4. Six problems, some of which PHP 7 addresses by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As I wrote in my article about PHP, some very simple coding standards analogous to those described in Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts will work around most of the stuff described in the "fractal" article. This left six distinct points, some of which PHP 7 addresses to an extent.

    • Number-like comparison of strings can never be fully turned off. PHP 7 type hints diminish this somewhat, as you at least know what types you are getting in and out of a function.
    • Parse errors are fatal rather than causing include_once to throw an exception the way Python's import does. PHP 7 converts many fatal errors to engine exceptions.
    • Inconsistent naming conventions and duplicate functionality. PHP 7 removes some of the duplicate functionality.
    • Associativity for the ternary ? : operator is on the less useful side. PHP 7 adds an additional null coalescing operator ?? whose associativity is on the useful side.
    • No keyword arguments. PHP 7 does not change this.
    • No file-level selection of old or new semantics the way Python has from __future__ import some_feature.