PHP 7: upcoming features

by Enrico Zimuel - Twitter: @ezimuel
Senior Sofware Engineer, Zend Technologies Ltd

PUG Torino, 29th April 2015

About me

Professional Developer since 1996. Senior Software Engineer at Zend Technologies, since 2008. Research in computer science at the Informatics Institute of Amsterdam University. Open source contributor and co-author of Apigility and Zend Framework. Co-author of the Italian books PHP Best Practices and Javascript Best Practices. Co-founder of PUG Torino (Italy).

PHP 7

Release scheduled for October 2015

Last major was PHP 5, 13 July 2004 (11 years ago!)

Last stable release is 5.6.8 (16 April 2015)

PHP 6 ?

Unicode support at the core language level

Not released, project is abandoned

PHP deadlines

PHP7 in a nutshell

• Great performance (thanks to PHPNG)
• Return Type Declarations
• Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• Remove PHP 4 Constructors
• Combined Comparison (Spaceship) Operator
• Exceptions in the engine
• Constructor behaviour of internal classes

Performance

PHPNG, PHP Next Generation

Project by Dmitry Stogov (Zend)

New data structure management in the PHP engine

Great performance improvement!

Benchmark

$a = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < 1000000; $i++) {
	$a[$i] = array("hello");
}
echo memory_get_usage(true);

PHP language

Wordpress

Frameworks/Apps

* values are req/sec

Return Type Declarations

function foo(): array {
	return [];
}

function bar(): DateTime {
    return null; // invalid
}

For more information read PHP RFC

Scalar Type Declarations

declare(strict_types=1);

function sendHttpStatus(int $statusCode, string $message) {
  header('HTTP/1.0 ' .$statusCode. ' ' .$message);
}
sendHttpStatus(404, "File Not Found"); // ok
sendHttpStatus("403", "OK"); // fatal error

function add(float $a, float $b): float {
    return $a + $b;
}
add(1, 2); // float(3)

For more information read PHP RFC

Anonymous Classes

/* return an anonymous class */
return new class($controller) implements Page {
    public function __construct($controller) {
        /* ... */
    }
    /* ... */
};

class Foo {}
$child = new class extends Foo {};
var_dump($child instanceof Foo); // true

For more information read PHP RFC

Combined Comparison Operator

Spaceship operator: (exprA) <=> (exprB)

0 if exprA == exprB, 1 if exprA > exprB, -1 if exprA < exprB

echo 1 <=> 1; // 0
echo 1 <=> 2; // -1
echo 2 <=> 1; // 1

echo "a" <=> "a"; // 0
echo "a" <=> "b"; // -1
echo "b" <=> "a"; // 1

For more information read PHP RFC

Exceptions in the engine

EngineException to manage exception from PHP engine

function call_method($obj) {
  $obj->method();
}

try {
    call_method(null); // oops!
} catch (EngineException $e) {
    echo "Exception: {$e->getMessage()}\n";
}

For more information read PHP RFC

Constructor behaviour of internal classes

This RFC proposes setting a standard that internal classes should either return a valid instance of the class or throw an exception

$mf = new MessageFormatter('en_US', '{incorrect}');
if ($mf === null) {
  echo "Surprise!";
}

For more information read PHP RFC

Much more...

• 64 bit platform improvements for string length and integer
• Uniform Variable Syntax
• Fix list() behavior inconsistency
• Filtered unserialize()
• Fast Parameter Parsing API
• ...

Check the RFC Wiki of PHP for the complete list

Some resource

Thanks!

More information Wiki RFC PHP

Contact me: enrico [at] zend.com

Follow me: @ezimuel

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