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.