PHP 7.0 Beta 1 Brings Better Performance, New Language Features

The first beta of the upcoming PHP 7 was released a few days ago. PHP 7.0 Beta 1 marks the point that this major update to PHP is feature-complete.

PHP 7.0 features improved performance, consistent 64-bit support, resolving more fatal errors into exceptions, the null coalescing operator was added, a combined comparison operator was added, return type declarations and scalar type declarations are now supported, and there is also support for anonymous classes.

The improved performance of PHP 7.0 is in some cases twice as fast as the current PHP 5.6 stable series while it will be interesting to see how it performs against Facebook's HHVM.

A second beta of PHP 7.0 is planned for release later this month while the official 7.0.0 release is tentatively planned for 12 November.

More details on PHP 7.0 Beta 1 over at PHP.net.