Each major and minor PHP release brings changes worth understanding beyond the changelog. This series covers what actually matters in each version: the features that stuck, the ones that didn’t, and why they were added in the first place.
PHP 7.0: performance, types, and the features that stuck
PHP 7.0 dropped on December 3rd. A month and a half in, I’ve migrated two projects and the results are hard to ignore. The headline number is 2x faster than PHP 5.6. That’s not a benchmark cherry-pick — it’s the median across real applications. The Zend Engine was rewritten to use a new internal value representation that cuts memory usage significantly and reduces allocations. On one project, average response time dropped by 40% with zero code changes. You just upgrade and it goes faster. ...