php7

A Practical Outlook on PHP7, I would bring it forward to say that, PHP7 release created the major expectation to the PHP lovers and most anticipated release of PHP programming happened to show up the high evaluation. Being familiar with PHP7 since its launch in the winters of 2015, I did work to bring an evaluated instructs over PHP7.

Some stimulating identities on PHP7

Here is the walk-through of the performance of this bench-marking tool with the summation in various aspects.

New Zend Engine

The Zend and PHP joined hands on 1999 after released PHP4. Initially, Zend engine II used the PHP5 series that was functionality enhanced and extensible object model adding to the performance enhancement. PHP7 receives a brand new version of the engine coming under the code name of PHP#NG (Next Generation).

The Speed

The advantage of the new PHPNG engine was the performance that had improved significantly. The PHPNG development team remarkably optimized memory consumption and refactored the Zend Engine.

php7

You can see the result, the performance benchmarks provided by the Zend Performance Team as in the above image. By using PHP 7 not only your code will be executed faster but you will also need fewer servers to serve the same amount of users.

Error Handling

Handling fatal and catchable fatal errors have never been an easy task for PHP developers. The new Engine Exceptions allows you to replace these errors with exceptions. If the exception is not catchable, PHP will return the same fatal errors as it does in the PHP5 series.

Code:
Try {
Call_method(null): //oops!
} catch (EngineException $e){
Echo Exception: {$e->getMessage()}\n;
}
//Exception call to member function method() on a non-object

The new EngineException objects does not extend the exception Base Class. This ensures compatibility and results in two different types of exceptions in error handling which are traditional and engine exceptions.

 64-Bit Windows Systems Support

PHP is a member of the LAMP stack which means it’s native development environment is Linux, but it is also possible to run it on a Windows machines. The PHP5 series still not provide 64-bit integer or large file support. So, as of now x64 builds have been considered experimental. PHP  introduces consistent 64-bit support which means native 64-bit integers and large files will be supported, allowing you to confidently run the language on your 64-bit Windows system in the future.

 The New Operators

The following are the new operations and they have been briefed as below.

Spaceship operator <=>

Null Coalescing operator ??

The Spaceship operator runs under and the official name which is Combined Comparison Operator. The new operator looks like this: <=> it’s looks like a simplified spaceship.

The operator returns 0 if both operands are equal, 1 if the left is greater, and -1 if the right is greater. It’s also called a three-way comparison operator and it is already available in other programming languages like Perl and Ruby.

operator2

The Null Coalescing operator is identified with two question marks ??  You can use it to check if something exists and return a default value, just in case it doesn’t. The operator returns the result if first operand exists and is not null, and the second operand in any other cases.

Anonymous Classes

PHP7 allows you to use anonymous classes, which is already a well-established in other object oriented languages like C# and Java. An anonymous class is a class without a name, that’s no name to the class. The object it instantiates has the same functionality as an object of a named class.

The syntax is the same as in traditional PHP classes, only the name is missing. If anonymous classes are used well, they can speed up coding as well as execution time. Anonymous classes are excellent when a class is used only once during execution.

Import from the same Namespace

The new group use declarations feature by god sent to those who want to import classes from the same namespace. The new syntax makes your code tidier and easier on the eyes, and saves you a lot of typing time. It will also be more easier to read through and debug the codes, group use declarations help you to identify the imports that belong to the same module.

Free up the Space

The main motive of PHP7 is to free up the space to enable performance improvement, it is necessary to get rid of many deprecated functionality and old, unsupported Server APIs and extensions.

All of the removed items will be deprecated for a while in PHP5 series, most likely you cannot used them for a long time. However, please note if you have a legacy app running on older PHP versions the new PHP7 can potentially breaks the code.

Get delighted and curious to take advantage of the benefits of PHP7 and do drop a note of your thought over this.