21 Aug 2015
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 1. This is the sixth pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.
THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!
PHP 7.0.0 RC 1 contains fixes for 27 reported bugs, and altogether over 200 commits with various stability improvements for database, array, assert, streams and other functionality.
PHP 7.0.0 comes with new version of the Zend Engine with features such as (incomplete list):
Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
Consistent 64-bit support
Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
The null coalescing operator (??)
Combined comparison Operator (<=>)
Return Type Declarations
Scalar Type Declarations
Anonymous Classes
For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.
For source downloads of PHP 7.0.0 RC 1 please visit the download page, Windows source and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/.
The next release will be RC 2, which is to be released on the 3rd of September. You can also read the full list of planned releases on our wiki.
Question: Iâm running an Ubuntu server with Apache2 and PHP 5.6. If I do an update from CLI, will this be included in that update? Or will it keep the PHP untouched? (Iâm new to Ubuntu; well, Linux in general, really.)
Hey @WolfShade, generally, except in extreme circumstances, Ubuntu will not update versions of the software in their repositories for a specific version of Ubuntu. Since youâve got php 5.6 (probably on Ubuntu 15.04 unless youâre testing 15.10), when you perform system updates, you will get security and maintenance updates for the php 5.6 series, but you wonât be upgraded to php 7.
If you want the update to php 7 on your current installation of php, you can compile the php yourself, or there will generally be a ppa setup somewhere that you can subscribe to that will contain php 7.
Thanks for your response. I am running Trusty Tahr (14.02) with PHP 5.6. And Iâm content with 5.6; I just wanted to make sure that update would not touch my PHP install, before running it. (If it had updated to 7, my head would have exploded from the aneurisms acquired during my apoplectic fit/seizure.)
Just curious here on why youâre on php 5.6 using Trusty. The php distributed with Ubuntu 14.04.2 Trusty is php 5.5. Current version on my Trusty installation is PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.11. Did you add a PPA to get to 5.6?
My Ubuntu distro didnât come with PHP in it. I did a Google search for installing Apache, followed those instructions, then Googled for adding the PHP module, followed those instructions, and got PHP 5.6 (even though the instructions indicated 5.5). I donât remember what commands I typed - it was a couple of months ago. (shrug)
umm why is it only twice as fast as PHP 5.6? I thought it should be magnitudes faster, since from what I heard both HHVM and node.js are magnitudes faster than PHP 5. Does this mean PHP 7 is still somewhat slow as compared to HHVM and node.js?
PHP 7âs speed is comparable to HHVMâs. But, it doesnât even have a JIT compiler yet, which HHVM does rely on for its improved speed. So, there is actually room for PHP7 to improve and go beyond HHVMâs performance.
Check out this video:
Rasmus talks about benchmarking against the other PHP versions and HHVM with different applications and frameworks towards minute 24.
umm so PHP 7âs speed is on par with HHVM, this means HHVM is only roughly about twice as fast as PHP 5 also. I feel a bit confused, I thought the facebook people made it magnitudes faster than vanilla PHP, the speed should be close to node.js and compiled languages like Java and C#.
@Hall_of_Famer - Where did you get your impression from?
Also remember, the applications and frameworks being benchmarked arenât really programmed to take up the full advantages HHVM has to offer, like using its asynchronous functionality, which is sort of Nodeâs calling card (although through a non-blocking event loop, which isnât quite the same, but similar.)
Iâd say HHVM and PHP7 are close to on par with the speed of Node.js for ânormalâ web applications. PHP wasnât ever really considerably slower than Node was to begin with. The issue with request processing performance is also usually found in the usage of resources, like the database or file system, and not in the pure PHP processing. In other words, before you can speed up your application with PHP7, youâll need to speed up your resources first.
By the way. If you havenât read it, I did an article about appserver.io, which is a (the first) multi-threaded web and application server based on pthreads, which, when it comes out with PHP7 support, will fly like a rocket too, with the big difference, everything is written in PHP!
