PHP 7 Ready For Release (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After a long wait web developers can finally start migrating their code to PHP 7. The new version comes with minimal syntax modifications, and is more focused on improving performance and upgrading PHP's core interpreter. Softpedia reports: "As mentioned above, PHP 7 is focused on speed, and benchmarks carried out over the past few months, have shown it to be almost twice as fast as older PHP 5.x releases, and neck in neck with Facebook's HHVM project, a Just-In-Time compiler for PHP code." A full list of new features is available here.

Comments

PHP7 Performance

[darkain]

I've been benchmarking the PHP 7 RCs against HHVM and PHP 5.6 for quite some time now with my own framework. I'm still perplexed as to why they are claiming it is faster than HHVM. Maybe in some specific benchmark? On my in-house framework, HHVM pushes nearly twice the requests-per-second performance compared to PHP 7. However, on the command line, PHP both 5.6 and 7 have a significantly faster startup time, but this point is mostly irrelevant for web servers.

PHP has not yet been released

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike slashdot's normal habit of running behind the times with news stories, this one is too early.

PHP 7 is slated for a full release tomorrow.

Good job guys....

Re:Marketing

[reanjr]

I'm not saying the curators of PHP aren't semi-retarded, but the reason they jumped over 6 is because 6 was basically a complete failure. They planned it out, but never managed to deliver. Anything important or useful in v6 was implemented in v5 point releases, and when it came time to put out a new major version, the number 6 had connotations that were undesirable.

So, I don't think "marketing war" is a fair characterization.

Cue the haters

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Cue the PHP haters to flood this topic with endless criticisms and loads of "it's SO awful" stories about how terrible PHP is.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I like PHP, and coding in it enabled me to make a shitload of money over the last dozen years or so. It still makes me money every single day, and all at a cost to me of almost nothing. Linux, Apache, mySQL, and PHP -the classic LAMP stack- has been very, very good to me.

Hate on it all you want, but working alone in my little home office I learned and used PHP to make more than enough money to buy a nice home, travel the world, support my family, and live a very comfortable life.

Is it the "best" language? I have no idea, but it's good enough for me and that's what counts.

So please, feel free to tell me how terrible and horrible it is. :)

7 is far less of a fustercluck than 5.2-5.3

[tepples]

The last time I compared Eevee's "fractal" article to ManiacDan's "hardly" rebuttal, I found that PHP's alleged problems fit into two categories: those that can be easily worked around with coding standards, and about a half dozen real issues.

PHP 7 has completely addressed one of the real issues, namely parse errors in include being fatal, by introducing engine exceptions. Function argument and return value type hints add some of the benefits of Python-style strong typing to PHP. And though associativity on ?: is still on the less useful side for reasons of backward compatibility, the new null coalesce operator ?? is on the proper side for chaining.

Logan's run for languages

[goombah99]

All languages start out cute and fuzzy then become smelly adolescents. By the time they hit 7.0 there should be a logan's run for languages.

Re:Is it still a clusterfuck?

[hcs_$reboot]

All of them have been addresses. Below is sample code of what PHP7 looks like

public static void main(String[] args){
Scanner scannerToReadAirlines = null;
try{
scannerToReadAirlines = new Scanner(new File("airlines.txt"));
}
catch(IOException e){
System.out.println("Could not connect to file airlines.txt.");
}
if(scannerToReadAirlines != null){
ArrayList<Airline> airlinesPartnersNetwork = new ArrayList<Airline>();
Airline newAirline;
String[] airlineNames;

}
}