PHP 7 has some awesome features, let’s break down exactly how different PHP 7 is, and what that means for developers.
1. PHP 7 Performance
PHP 7 is built on the NGPHP—’Next Generation PHP’—branch, created by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. Now, it’s referred to as the Zend 3 engine, distinguishing it from the Zend 2 it replaces.
Zend 3 refactors the Zend engine to use more compact data structures, fewer heap allocations and deallocations, and improved cache locality. It retains near-complete language compatibility, so the new Zend Engine 3 is all upside.
Zend 3 provides radical acceleration: doubling or even tripling speedscompared to PHP 5 is not unheard of, and can be achieved without changing a line of code as well as in all new code going forward.
Key Web functionality is radically accelerated with PHP 7, including WordPress.
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