Performance

PHP 7.4 landed November 28th. It’s the last 7.x release before PHP 8.0, and it feels like it. The features are substantial enough to stand on their own, but they also read as groundwork for what’s coming. Typed properties This is the one. Since PHP 7.0, you could type function parameters and return values. But class properties? Still untyped: class User { public int $id; public string $name; public ?DateTimeInterface $deletedAt; } 7.4 changes that. Typed properties enforce types at assignment, not just at call sites. Classes become self-documenting in a way that docblocks never quite managed, and the engine catches type errors before they propagate through half your stack. ...

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. ...