PHP 7: An quick overview

PHP 7.0.0 was released on December 3rd, 2015. The community quickly produced several builds which make it easy to install this new version using your system’s package manager.Now You can download the source code here php-7.0.0
The PHP 7 release brought some much-desired changes and improvements to the most popular programming language of the Web.

This is the most important change for PHP since the release of PHP 5, bringing performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption, and a host of brand-new language features to make your apps soar.

• Scalar Type Declarations
• Return Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• The Closure::call() method
• Generator delegation
• Generator return expressions
• Null Coalesce Operator
• Combined Comparison (Spaceship) Operator
• Throwables
• Level support for the dirname() function
• The Integer division function
• Uniform variable syntax

Deprecated functionality which will be removed in PHP 7

Deprecated extensions :

• ext/ereg
• ext/mysql((since PHP 5.5; use ext/mysqli or ext/pdo_mysql instead))

Deprecated ini options: include xsl.security_prefs and iconv.input_encoding, iconv.output_encoding, iconv.internal_encoding, mbstring.http_input,mbstring.http_output, and mbstring.internal_encoding.

Deprecated functions:

• dl on fpm-fcgi
• set_magic_quotes_runtime and magic_quotes_runtime
• set_socket_blocking (stream_set_blocking as a replacement)
• mcrypt_generic_end (mcrypt_generic_deinit as a replacement)
• mcrypt_ecb, mcrypt_cbc, mcrypt_cfb and mcrypt_ofb (mcrypt_encrypt and mcrypt_decrypt as a replacement)
• datefmt_set_timezone_id and IntlDateFormatter::setTimeZoneID (datefmt_set_timezone and IntlDateFormatter::setTimeZone as a replacement)
• Other Deprecated miscellaneous functionality:
• The $is_dst parameter used with the gmmktime() and mktime() functions
• # style comments from ini files (use ; style comments as a replacement)
• setlocale() string category names (LC_* constants as a replacement)
• Unsafe curl file uploads (CurlFile as a replacement)
• preg_replace() eval modifier (preg_replace_callback as a replacement)
• such driver option as PDO::PGSQL_ATTR_DISABLE_NATIVE_PREPARED_STATEMENT (since PHP 5.6; use PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES as a replacement)
• such context options as CN_match and SNI_server_name stream (peer_name as a replacement)

Resources

These official PHP resources you may find them useful:

• PHP 7 Performance
• PHP Manual: Migrating from PHP 5.6.x to PHP 7.0.x
• PHP 7 UPGRADING doc
• PHP 7 Requests for Comments
• PHPNG (next generation)
  
• Deprecated features in PHP 7.0.x
• WordPress & PHP7