The new features of PHP 7

by Enrico Zimuel - @ezimuel
Senior Software Engineer
Zend Technologies, a Rogue Wave Company (USA)

Codemotion, Milan, 25th Nov. 2016

PHP

• PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
• The most popular server-side language: PHP is used by 82.3% of all the websites (source: w3techs.com)
• Used by Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Etsy, Flickr, Digg, etc
• 21 years of usage, since 1995
• Full OOP support since PHP 5

PHP ecosystem

• CMS: Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc
• E-commerce: Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, etc
• CRM: CiviCRM, SugarCRM, Vtiger, Zurmo, etc
• Wiki: DokuWiki, MediaWiki, PmWiki, etc
• Framework: Laravel, Symfony, Zend Framework, etc

PHP 7

Released: 3 December 2015

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

Last release is 7.0.13 (10 Nov 2016)

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/Scalar Type Declarations
• Cryptographic secure pseudo-random number generator (CSPRNG)
• Anonymous Classes
• Combined Comparison (Spaceship) Operator
• Null coalescing operator
• New Error hierarchy

Performance

PHPNG, PHP Next Generation

Project by Dmitry Stogov (Zend)

New data structure management in the PHP engine

Great performance improvement!

Benchmark

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

Other languages

Wordpress

Case studies

• Badoo saved one million dollars switching to PHP 7 (source)
• Tumblr reduced the latency and CPU load by half moving to PHP 7 (source)
• Dailymotion handles twice more traffic with same infrastructure switching to PHP 7 (source)

Return Type Declarations

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

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

More information: PHP documentation

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)

More information: PHP documentation

CSPRNG

Cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators

// generates a random number between 1 and 100
$num = random_int(1,100);

// generates a random string of 1 Kb
$bytes = random_bytes(1024);

More information: PHP documentation

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

More information: PHP documentation

Spaceship operator

A <=> B

0 if A == B, 1 if A > B, -1 if A < B

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

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

Null coalescing

?? operator

// Fetches the value of $_GET['user'] and returns 'nobody'
// if it does not exist.
$username = $_GET['user'] ?? 'nobody';
// This is equivalent to:
$username = isset($_GET['user']) ? $_GET['user'] : 'nobody';

// Coalescing can be chained
$username = $_GET['user'] ?? $_POST['user'] ?? 'nobody';

New Error hierarchy

Throwable: Error, Exception

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

try {
    call_method(null); // oops!
} catch (Error $e) {
    printf ("Error: %s\n", $e->getMessage());
} catch (Exception $e) {
    printf ("Exception: %s\n", $e->getMessage());
}

More information: PHP documentation

Much more...

• Consistent 64-bit support
• Fix list() behavior inconsistency
• Filtered unserialize()
• Group use declarations
• Closure::call()
• Expectations
• ...

Check the PHP 7 new features at php.net

PHP 7.1

• Nullable types
• Void return types
• Deprecation of Mcrypt ext
• Support of Authenticated Encryption in OpenSSL
• Support class constant visibility
• Iterable pseudo-type
• ...

Check the PHP 7.1 new features at php.net

Thanks!

Contact me: enrico.zimuel [at] roguewave.com

Blog and web site: www.zimuel.it

Follow me: @ezimuel

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I used reveal.js to make this presentation.