A beta version of PHP 7.0.0 has been released with a complete feature set, including 64-bit support, a new version of the Zend Engine and performance improvements, according to the PHP development team.
(Related: An “API-first” PHP framework)
The PHP development team stressed that this is a development preview not yet meant for production use. Some of the other features in PHP 7.0.0 Beta 1 include:
- Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
- Removal of old and unsupported server application programming interfaces and extensions
- A null coalescing operator
- A combined comparison Operator
- Return Type Declarations
- Scalar Type Declarations
- Anonymous Classes
The full list of new features and changes is available on GitHub, and PHP 7.0.0 Beta 2 is set for release on July 23.
