The latest PHP version will be released later this year
The PHP 7 Timeline RFC was approved in a near unanimous vote, and aims to release PHP 7 in October 2015. Even if it’s delayed a bit, we’re still likely to see it before the year is out!!
The final feature set for PHP 7 is almost completely finalized, and will officially close by the end of March.
See the PHP 7 timeline Read more
PHP Space Ships
It will introduce a new operator <=> conveniently similar to a TIE fighter and dubbed the Spaceship Operator. It can be used for combined comparisons – mostly when dealing with sorting.
Return Type Declarations & Scalar Type Hints
It will allow developers to declare what kind of return type a function is expected to have – similar to argument Type Hints.
In addition, argument type hints and the new return-type declarations now support new scalar types, allowing developers to denote that they’re expecting strings, floats, ints or bools to be passed or returned.
PHP 7 Performance
It is based on the PHPNG project (PHP Next-Gen), that was led by Zend to speed up PHP applications.
The performance gains realized from it’s huge! They vary between 25% and 70% on real-world apps, and all of that just from upgrading PHP, without having to change a single line of code!
