Introducing PHP 7 – a revolution in the way we deliver applications that power everything from websites and mobile to enterprises and the cloud. This is the most important change for PHP since the release of PHP 5 in 2004, bringing explosive performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption, and a host of brand-new language features to make your apps soar.

Designed and refactored for today’s workloads, PHP 7 is the ultimate choice for web developers today. We’ll take a look at the top  features here.

1. SPEED!

The developers worked very hard to refactor the PHP codebase in order to reduce memory consumption and increase performance. And they certainly succeeded.

Benchmarks for PHP 7 consistently show speeds twice as fast as PHP 5.6 and many times even faster!

2. Type Declarations

Type declarations simply means specifying which type of variable is being set instead of allowing PHP to set this automatically. PHP is considered to be a weak typed language. In essence, this means that PHP does not require you to declare data types.

3. New Operators

Spaceship Operator

PHP 7 also brings us some new operators. The first one we’re going to explore is the spaceship operator. With a name like that, who doesn’t want to use it? The spaceship operator, or Combined Comparison Operator, is a nice addition to the language, complementing the greater-than and less-than operators.

Spaceship Operator
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