₦airaland Forum

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 Alpha 1. This release marks the beginning of the 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 Alpha 1 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

http://php.net/archive/2015.php#id2015-01-11-6

Finally, hope they didn't break the language heard they were contemplating on removing the old style of constructor in php (i.e method with same name and class) and sticking with __construct() method, I read the features last year, the return type is awesome but what if I'm either returning string or array just like in the standard php doc i.e string|array, all the same will try this version on my system tho

good one

Twice as fast as php 5.6? Now how does that compare with other languages such as python?

CRAZYMADMAN:
Twice as fast as php 5.6? Now how does that compare with other languages such as python?

hehehe well you can fork the alpha release and compare speed but i too am interested on speed with other platforms am sure pple are benchmarking it as we speak. Yii is gonna not only run fast but do a flash speed