For seven years, PHP has been the fourth most popular programming language, driving more than 200 million websites around the world , more than 81.7% of the world's public websites use PHP on the server side. PHP takes its biggest leap since 2004 this week, as PHP 7 has been released. The biggest feature of PHP 7 is its greatly improved performance. In some WordPress benchmark tests, the performance can reach 3 times that of PHP 5.6.
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PHP 7.0.2 Final for Windows 32-bit (14.59 MB)
PHP 7.0.2 Final for Windows 64-bit (14.59 MB)
PHP 7.0.2 Final for Linux (10.52 MB)
PHP 7 also has some other smaller improvements, such as significantly reducing memory usage, adding return type declarations and other functions. PHP 7 includes some major security improvements, such as removing PHP safe mode, adding magic quotes, having some new reserved keywords, and more. This means that web applications like WordPress will need to be partially redesigned in order to be ready for the PHP 7 release, and WordPress now looks to be fully compatible with PHP 7.
Although PHP 7 has been released, it will take several years for widespread adoption. Web applications, especially those targeted at enterprises, will take several years to upgrade to the new version of the platform. However, many web developers find PHP 7's huge performance improvements attractive to them.
Version 7.0.2
07 Jan 2016
Core:
Fixed bug #71165 (-DGC_BENCH=1 doesn't work on PHP7).
Fixed bug #71163 (Segmentation Fault: cleanup_unfinished_calls).
Fixed bug #71109 (ZEND_MOD_CONFLICTS("xdebug") doesn't work).
Fixed bug #71092 (Segmentation fault with return type hinting).
Fixed bug memleak in header_register_callback.
Fixed bug #71067 (Local object in class method stays in memory for each call).
Fixed bug #66909 (configure fails utf8_to_mutf7 test).
Fixed bug #70781 (Extension tests fail on dynamic ext dependency).
Fixed bug #71089 (No check to duplicate zend_extension).
Fixed bug #71086 (Invalid numeric literal parse error within highlight_string() function).
Fixed bug #71154 (Incorrect HT iterator invalidation causes iterator reuse).
Fixed bug #52355 (Negating zero does not produce negative zero).
Fixed bug #66179 (var_export() exports float as integer).
Fixed bug #70804 (Unary add on negative zero produces positive zero).
CURL:
Fixed bug #71144 (Sementation fault when using cURL with ZTS).
DBA:
Fixed key leak with invalid resource.
Filter:
Fixed bug #71063 (filter_input(INPUT_ENV, ..) does not work).
FTP:
Implemented FR #55651 (Option to ignore the returned FTP PASV address).
FPM:
Fixed bug #70755 (fpm_log.c memory leak and buffer overflow).
GD:
Fixed bug #70976 (Memory Read via gdImageRotateInterpolated Array Index Out of Bounds).
Mbstring:
Fixed bug #71066 (mb_send_mail: Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault).
Opcache:
Fixed bug #71127 (Define in auto_prepend_file is overwrite).
PCRE:
Fixed bug #71178 (preg_replace with arrays creates [0] in replace array if not already set).
Readline:
Fixed bug #71094 (readline_completion_function corrupts static array on second TAB).
Session:
Fixed bug #71122 (Session GC may not remove obsolete session data).
SPL:
Fixed bug #71077 (ReflectionMethod for ArrayObject constructor returns wrong number of parameters).
Fixed bug #71153 (Performance Degradation in ArrayIterator with large arrays).
Standard:
Fixed bug #71270 (Heap BufferOver Flow in escapeshell functions).
WDDX:
Fixed bug #70661 (Use After Free Vulnerability in WDDX Packet Deserialization).
Fixed bug #70741 (Session WDDX Packet Deserialization Type Confusion Vulnerability).
XMLRPC:
Fixed bug #70728 (Type Confusion Vulnerability in PHP_to_XMLRPC_worker).
PHP 7.0.2 official version released: WordPress speed increased by 3 times!
When it comes to PHP, some people will definitely say that this is the best programming language in the world. In terms of popularity alone, more than 81.7% of the world's server backends currently use the PHP language, which drives more than 200 million websites around the world. The official version of PHP7 was released early last month, ushering in the largest version update since 2004. Now, PHP 7.0.2 is officially released.
The most significant change in PHP7 is the great improvement in performance, which is close to the PHP execution engine HHVM developed by Facebook. In the WordPress benchmark performance test, the speed is 2 to 3 times faster than version 5.6, which greatly reduces memory usage. PHP7 also has some changes in the language, such as adding return type declarations and adding some new reserved keywords. In terms of security, PHP safe mode is removed, magic quotes are added, etc. Not only that, the new version also supports 64-bit and contains the latest version of the Zend engine.
Although it has been officially released, it will take a long time for PHP7 to be popularized. Many web hosting services and enterprise web applications may continue to use the old version for a long time in the future due to compatibility considerations. However, currently, WordPress, the world’s most popular PHP blogging platform, is fully prepared for PHP7.