On 3rd Dec 2015 the PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0. Nethub as an official Hong Kong mirror site of PHP.NET now supports PHP 7 by commercial web hosting and VPS hosting services, which is the first web hosting provider supporting PHP 7 in Hong Kong.

This release marks the start of the new major PHP 7 series, 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 (AST)
  • 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