On December 3rd 2015, the PHP group published PHP 7.0.0.
PHP 7.0.0 comes with a new version of the Zend Engine, numerous improvements and new features such as :
- 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
The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.
The migration guide is available in the PHP Manual. Please consult it for the detailed list of new features and backward incompatible changes.
I am now proud to announce that packages of PHP 7.0.0 are now available for Debian 8 “Jessie” on amd64 and i386 architectures!
On the Dotdeb side, I wanted to make things right and compatible with what will happen for Stretch. So the packaging method has been synchronized to Sid’s one in terms of naming and versioning (once again, thanks to the Debian maintainers for their awesome work!). That means that :
- The packages of SAPI (Apache2, FPM, CLI, CGI, Embed…) and of core modules (GD, MySQL, mastering, OpCache…) are built as usual from the upstream source, and are named php7.0-* instead of just php7-*.
- This new naming convention and packaging method will help to produce future php7.x-* packages more easily. And you could even install several PHP 7+ versions on the same server without any conflict!
- You should remove any PHP5 packages before upgrading
- The json and OpCache modules are now packaged separately, respectively name php7.0-json and php7.0-opcache.
- All these packages are built using git-buildpackage and Jenkins.
- Packages of the PECL extensions (Memcache, Memcached, Mongo, Redis, Xdebug…) are still missing and require some work from me.
- The thread-safe version of all these packages will be published soon.
Please make sure that you understand the above PHP/Debian/Dotdeb changes and that you don’t need any of the missing features/packages. Your feedbacks are always welcome. Just make sure they are useful.
These packages have been published on the main repository for Jessie because they have new names because they shouldn’t conflict with any PHP5 installation. So to get PHP 7.0.0 , just follow the regular instructions for Jessie.
And as usual, feel free to show your support, it is always greatly appreciated, especially if we consider the high level of expectations that you all have for this new major release… 🙂