Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution based on Debian. It's often thought of as more of a desktop oriented distro, but it is quite a common for web hosting too. It is also the distribution of choice for many developers who are not that focused on Linux administration.
The timespan between launches was PHP 5 to 7 was long, but feature and performance wise there were a number of improvements in the 5.x series. For performance the greatest leap was inclusion of the Opcode cache by default since 5.5.
Benchmarks are the mother of all click baits. They draw people like flies, create controversy and make people jump to conclusions. For raw computation such as video encoding benchmarks can be very effective at demonstrating differences between different technologies.
For the dynamic environment web applications run in, benchmarks rarely represent reality and are more or less synthetic. Yet web benchmarks have got their place to give ballpark figures of differences.
PHP 7 was made available on December 3rd 2015. It offers great improvements in performance and memory use, which are even more significant in resource limited environments like the Raspberry Pi. Together with MySQL 5.7 and the lightweight H2O web server it offers significant gains to performance in LAMP applications.
November of 2015 is shaping up to be an exciting month for developers working with the PHP language. Four significant projects are expected to be launched in the next thirty days: PHP 7.0.0, Symfony3, eZ Platform and Drupal 8.
In the JavaScript realm it's become a common practise to transpile code. This means that you write your code in the latest & greatest syntax and translate that to something that is widely supported.
That's how JS developers are deploying ES 2015 to production today, even though complete browser or server implementations don't exist.