PHP 7.0 RC1 Released, PHP 7 Final Comes Closer

The first release candidate is out today for PHP 7.0 and it marks the sixth pre-release for the PHP 7 series.

PHP 7.0 RC1 ships with 27 reported bug-fixes and more than 200 commits in total for continuing to improve the stability of various language functions.

For those that have been living underneath a rock, PHP 7.0 is set to be up to twice as fast as the current stable PHP 5.6 release, will provide consistent 64-bit support, there's now a null coalescing operator, a combined comparison operator, and various other language additions. What most PHP developers though have been looking forward to is just the speed improvements with making the PHP interpreter faster against Facebook's HHVM implementation.

More details on PHP 7.0 Release Candidate 1 can be found via PHP.net. PHP 7.0.0 is still anticipated for release in October.