PHP 7 released and Symfony 4 announced
PHP 7 is the single most significant release of the popular open source programming language powering large parts of the web since version 5.0, released back in 2004.
The new version comes with improved performance and new language features. Some of the highlights are here:
- Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
- Significantly reduced memory usage
- Abstract Syntax Tree
- Consistent 64-bit support
- Improved Exception hierarchy
- Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
- Secure random number generator
- Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
- The null coalescing operator (??)
- Return and Scalar Type Declarations
- Anonymous Classes
- Zero cost asserts
More information and download links from the Official PHP site. Linux distributions like Redhat based CentOS and Debian will get their first versions of PHP 7 via extra repositories like Remi and Dotdeb.
Future versions of Symfony
In addition to PHP, the SymfonyCon 2015 in Paris, celebrating 10 years of Symfony is ongoing. During the keynote of today's session, it's clear the leadership of Symfony have their eyes set on the future.
The future versions of Symfony include 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and finally 3.4. Like the 2.8 and 3.0 releases, the last version of 3.x series will be made available at the same time as the first release of 4.0 - in November 2017. With 3.4 being an LTS (Long Term Support) release, starting a project today with 3.0 you've got framework version supported beyond 2020 - a safe bet.
@fabpot speak about Symfony4 for 2017... WTF? pic.twitter.com/GibyCA8VB5
— Symfomany (@Symfomany) December 3, 2015