As you may have read on our June 29th blog post, the alpha version of PHP 7 was released. Since that post was published, PHP released the first beta version of PHP. We know that PHP 7 has a clear cut focus on performance. Let’s look at some of the contributing elements to those performance improvements and the other enhancements included with PHP 7.

*The Spaceship Operator/Combined Comparison Operator (<=>) – Similar to a TIE fighter, the Spaceship Operator can be used for combined comparisons, largely when working with sorting.

*PHPNG – PHP 7 is based on the PHPNG project (PHP Next-Gen). This is one of the largest reasons for the faster performance seen with PHP 7. The early word is that PHP 7 is twice as fast as PHP 5.6.

*Functions – Much like Type Hints, developers can declare what sort of return type a function is expected in PHP 7.

*Consistent support of 64-bit.

*Return and Scalar Type Declarations

*Many of the fatal errors are now just exceptions

Remember that A2 Hosting offers PHP 7 Hosting on our Turbo Servers. This is your opportunity to get your heads on the latest version of PHP. Just keep in mind this is a beta version and we cannot guarantee compatibility with your applications.

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