PHP 7 Released

https://github.com/php/php-src/releases/tag/php-7.0.0

by legierski • 11 years ago

449 307 11 years ago

DigitalSea• 11 years ago

Probably one of the biggest releases since 5 in my opinion. Scalar and return type declarations being added in are a couple of massive additions. For a language that used to cop a lot of flak, PHP sure has grown to become a mature and quite decent language.

maweki• 11 years ago

by copying all the python features :D

miseg• 11 years ago

By learning from Python's best practices :)

humbertomn2• 11 years ago

I would rather see both teams working together for one single language :) I wrote a little about it here http://goo.gl/XFR2Xt

est• 11 years ago

And smoke Python in performance.

ircmaxell2• 11 years ago

Except that in PHP type declaration mismatches are actually errors... They aren't just "documentation" to be used by static analyzers.

sneak7• 11 years ago

No, PHP isn't "quite decent". It's still a steaming turd, it's just been polished with a whole bunch of features.

toddan• 11 years ago

Please explain why.

Flimm• 11 years ago

PHP 7 new features: http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.php

jafingi• 11 years ago

It's really a great release! Great work by all the contributors.

trm429• 11 years ago

PHP 7 makes life a lot better for PHP devs in many ways but one awesome thing is it obsoletes bunch of out-of-date tutorials by finally removing the old Mysql extension \o/

http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php

I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month and learned bunch of best practices quickly.

mintplant• 11 years ago

Wow, they finally made good on their promise to remove ereg_*. I remember reading the deprecation notice on those functions (and using them anyway) maybe half a lifetime ago when I was first learning PHP.

jamesoneill• 11 years ago

I did the exact same thing back when I was first learning web development in 2012. All the PHP tutorials I used were really outdated but since I was new to it I had no way of knowing that.

Thankfully I didn't get the chance to do any damage before I was exposed to modern best practices.

arien2• 11 years ago

I think it's great to point new developers to the right resources. Besides sane frameworks, there are some good starting/best practices guides to help (that are regularly updated), such as:

http://www.phptherightway.com https://phpbestpractices.org

Also, I would encourage them to look at different frameworks, not just one. It'll help if they later move onto other languages, as they'll be already exposed to different ways of doing things :)

mattmanser2• 11 years ago

Is phptherightway up to date?

I only ask as scanning it I see that it recommends IIS7 for production PHP on windows servers. Which I believe you could only get using an unpatched windows 2008 server?

ewams• 11 years ago

Very first part of the tutorial: "Use the Current Stable Version (5.6)"

aikah3• 11 years ago

I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month and learned bunch of best practices quickly.

There is some middle ground good practice which is using PDO, or even better Doctrine/DBAL . I don't think Laravel's ORM is that good, and the Active Record Pattern is somehow controversial.

sbarre• 11 years ago

I spent a good while trying to integrate Doctrine into my projects, and in the end I found it bloated and overly verbose and went back to PDO.

I am sure that it has valid use cases, but for a lot of straightforward PHP projects, it's complete overkill and adds more work than it saves (in my opinion of course).

I agree with knowing PDO though, I would say that's required knowledge for any self-respecting PHP developer.

pc86• 11 years ago

Active Record Pattern is somehow controversial.

What is controversial about AR?

trm429• 11 years ago

Well anything is better than the old and original Mysql extension for PHP. If you Google "PHP MySQL tutorial", there's lots of tutorials teaching still about mysql_connect and mysql_query.

AR is controversial but it is approachable.

In addition, I figure, those old PHP tutorials (code like it's the 2003!) are giving bad example and beginners can't understand the difference or realize that mysql_query + bunch of procedural code per file * 10 can be bad thing.

I should've been a bit more clearer. Laravel taught him bunch of generic best practices (like deployment procedures, GIT, OOP, MVC, etc) and using Laravel Query Builder and/or Eloquent makes the DB code more sane compared to mysql_query.

Laravel isn't the only framework which could've done this but like AR, it's quite beginner friendly :)

Scarblac5• 11 years ago

I am an experienced programmer but I've only touched PHP a few times, years ago. What are the best books or tutorials to get an overview of modern PHP?

ryan-allen• 11 years ago

I think the question is why should you bother with PHP at all? It had its time in the history of the web but that time has passed, long, long ago.

cyphax• 11 years ago

I found http://www.phptherightway.com/ to be very useful. Here is also a review of it to get another impression of this freely available book: http://alanstorm.com/php-the-right-way-review

RadioactiveMan• 11 years ago

I thought Modern PHP by Josh Lockhart, also the author of PHP the Right Way, was a helpful overview.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033868.do

trm429• 11 years ago

If you're into videos, then Laracasts is awesome :)

ethnt• 11 years ago

That's how it's taught at the college I go to. About half the class already had experience with PHP/MySQL, and were a bit horrified.

nnq• 11 years ago

I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel

...why didn't you taught him about PDO, so he can start with something more universal, not tied to one particular framework that happens to be popular nowadays?!

Then he can learn whichever OR/DM or DAL he might like need (Eloquent, Doctrine, Redbean, IdiORM/Paris etc.), and also be able to pop the hood and debug it when needed.

I never get it why so many otherwise-good PHP devs have their heads full of framework-specific knowledge and have a propensity to fall in love with heavy frameworks like Laravel, or worse, with leviathans like Symphony or Zend ...instead of playing to the language's advantages and using light-weight tools and libraries that would allow them to move faster.

trm429• 11 years ago

I could've done that but that wouldn't have taught the same things. PDO is awesome but requires deeper level of understanding (for a beginner), which may increase the frustration and may end up returning back to the mysql_query and co.

It's easier point to framework that's already using PDO and and making sane defaults and solving bootstrapping problems. Once you've learned bunch of new concepts like ORM in one framework, it's easy to understand other ORs and be able to compare it to DMs.

My own experience with Laravel has been really positive. Actually I was thinking about creating something similar until I learned about Laravel, so it solved lots of existing annoyances regarding PHP coding for me.

Everybody needs to start somewhere and I believe that by nudging towards Laravel, my young friend'll learn more in the long run and in the meantime can concentrate on making services instead of writing home grown PDO helpers and custom routing libraries. They are problems that have been solved already multiple times.

Also, Symfony and Laravel communities are encouraging and teaching about the better ways of doing things so that'll help him in the long run.

In many small project it's more fun and more easier to use $favorite_framework instead of searching for reinvented wheel. There are cases when it's better to do more custom solutions but for many cases frameworks are just awesome

aarondf• 11 years ago

instead of playing to the language's advantages and using light-weight tools and libraries that would allow them to move faster.

Depending on what you mean by "move faster", I may have to disagree. Besides a one-off script, I can't envision a scenario where using "tools and libraries" would allow you to move faster than using Laravel.

Laravel comes with an unbelievable amount of stuff done for you, right out of the box. Routing, Auth, Database, Queueing, Caching, Asset Pipeline, Templating, etc, etc. If your goal is to rapidly develop an application, there really is no better framework than Laravel to get that going. There's even a vagrant box that's all tooled for Laravel.

TBF, I may have misunderstood what you meant by "move faster".

superskierpat• 11 years ago

My final project in my php class last year was way better than it would of been due to one simple website : http://www.phptherightway.com/

Edit: Posted this before seeing the other comments suggesting it already, dope

sneak7• 11 years ago

Urge him to switch to a sane language instead. You are doing no one a service by advising them how to make using PHP suck less.

Scarbutt• 11 years ago

aspiring web developer

Did he already know javascript? if not, why didn't you point him to that instead?

trm429• 11 years ago

At least he was aware of it but preferred to keep it in the browser side.

He had already started building something based on old PHP tutorials, what could be more useful if he has some small site to build:

A. Tell there's a nicer and easier way to do it in PHP with well thought framework B. Tell server JS is so awesome (and all the cool kids are using:), you just need to start completely from the beginning

Introducing things gradually can help a lot and lessen the frustration. Nowadays he's really into Vue and React but still likes to handle backends with Laravel :)

Also learning is one of those things that helps if the learning stuff isn't too far away from the skills you already have. Introducing too much at the same time makes learning more frustrating - especially if you want to get something finished instead of trying to multiple ways of doing the same thing.

ck22• 11 years ago

Oh you can most certainly compile mysql right back into PHP7

ceejayoz2• 11 years ago

Someone who's using mysql_* functions is probably not compiling their own versions of PHP.

imaginenore• 11 years ago

The problem with Laravel is, while being a sane framework, it absolutely kills the performance, especially the last version, which is now slower than Symfony.

http://blog.a-way-out.net/blog/2015/03/27/php-framework-benc...

RohithMeethal• 11 years ago

I wish every PHP developer would reread the docs and start using new features available instead of just continuing with what they know already just because it works. And of course if there was any way to remove all those old tutorials out there.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise.

longwave3• 11 years ago

The performance improvements along with the support policy should hopefully encourage many sites to move to PHP 7 within a year; PHP 5.6 will be unsupported in 8 months (though it will receive security fixes for another year).

aikah3• 11 years ago

And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise.

It will depend on hosting companies for some public websites and sysadmins for internal business apps. Ironically the sysadmins I know will be the hardest people to convince, for some reasons.

that's basically why as much as I can , I chose solutions with no dependencies when I'm working on apps for internal use (like Go,Nim,..). It solves a whole lot of issues. I just can't stand having to convince someone else to do his job in order to do mine.

ams61103• 11 years ago

Our production environment is just this month upgrading to 5.6.

cdnsteve3• 11 years ago

I'd disagree with this. Performance increases get attention from system admins. It will take time yes, but if it saves them money, they will likely investigate sooner.

captn3m02• 11 years ago

I interview a lot of php-devs, and a very large proportion of PHP shops are still on 5.4 or earlier (which is all EOL). Very often they are not at all aware of the new features in 5.5 and later.

CodeIgniter is still popular and a lot of developers have no clue about namespaces and composer usage. It will really take a _long while_ before php7 becomes commonplace.

Practicality3• 11 years ago

We will be going live with v7 as soon as I test it on the dev servers, so probably this week. Not everyone is so slow.

TazeTSchnitzel6• 11 years ago

GoPHP5 successfully forced the community to move to 5 en masse. We can do the same again for 7 if we need to.

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

Isn't that true for users of other major languages either? Java 1.4, Python 2, ES4, etc.

oblio5• 11 years ago

PHP is very likely to be the language used by Mort: http://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/

I doubt any of those developers are ever going to switch what they're already using unless they are forced by some external factor.

The more serious factor is: if you're on Hackernews, you're at least Elvis or even Einstein. Mort is out of reach for most internet media for programmers.

mei0Iesh4• 11 years ago

This is an arrogant and immature type of thing to write. This is programming, not high school cool-kids club. PHP is a wonderful tool that was mostly responsible for the dynamic web. Before it became popular, the web was mostly static HTML with an occasional CGI form, probably written in something like Perl, mostly just for emailing the webmaster. Maybe some small amount of JavaScript for something like rollover effects, but that's about it.

It's kind of like the situation today with the resurgence of JavaScript. One day the kids of the next decade will be posting snarky attitude basically calling JavaScript users retards because they don't use the cool-kids' PepoCOde. Lame. PHP is still excellent technology, and very relevant still for building dynamic server-side websites.

It used to be that people using JavaScript were made fun of for being "scripters", not "programmers". Everyone knows JavaScript is the language of Mort. Only Franken Elvis uses C.

jacquesm7• 11 years ago

I think you should actually read the text of the article you linked to. It contradicts the rest of your comment.

taytus• 11 years ago

Elitist much?

almsgiver• 11 years ago

A tag is not a release, it should be officially released tomorrow.

agbonghama• 11 years ago

What could go wrong after a tag? To me, a tag is a release.

TazeTSchnitzel6• 11 years ago

The tag could change.

razvan_moldovan• 11 years ago

yeeeeh :D great work

egeozcan• 11 years ago

Why do they keep adding global functions like "intdiv"? For example in JS, it being another language with a similar compatibility burden, they are moving most of the global functions (like parseInt) to "namespaces" (like Number.parseInt) while keeping global references there. When I open the docs (for example, the array functions page[1]), I get frightened by the global functions which do not seem to share a naming convention on first glance.

disclaimer: I haven't written anything significant with PHP since too many years.

[1] http://php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php

monk_e_boy2• 11 years ago

This is ongoing in the PHP community. For those who like purity there are tons and tons of wrapper classes that hide all that stuff away.

Modern IDEs autocomplete all the functions, I'm using PHPStorm and as soon as I type 'arr' it shows me a list of all the array functions with parameters listed.

Not perfect, but if I was worried about that kind of thing I'd use Python (which I love) or RoR (which I also love).

The ethos of PHP is to just get stuff done: http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-le...

wtetzner3• 11 years ago

The ethos of PHP is to just get stuff done

I never understood this standpoint. I hear this from the Go community sometimes too. Wouldn't having some sane organization of functions make it easier to "just get stuff done"? Just like in Go, wouldn't generics make it easier to get stuff done?

scotty794• 11 years ago

When you put stuff in namespaces you need to remember in which namespace it is (and which library to refrence).

Number.parseInt is not that bad but I'll take to_json() global function instead of (new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize() (or was it Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject()?) any day.

Sure, names of PHP functions look arbitrary and inconsistent but when you know the name of the function you know everything you need (apart from how to use it which you can quickly and unambigously check like: http://php.net/file_get_contents )

rjbwork• 11 years ago

I just type JsonConvert and hit Alt-Enter. #JustReSharperThings

aikah3• 11 years ago

Number.parseInt is not that bad but I'll take to_json() global function instead of (new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize() any day.

It doesn't have to be one or the other.

In fact, array functions could just be under the same static class, like Array::TheFunction() . It would be acceptable and limit chances of namespace collision .

untog3• 11 years ago

Or, to keep with the JS example:

   JSON.stringify()

Not exactly that bad.

estefan5• 11 years ago

When you put stuff in namespaces you need to remember in which namespace it is (and which library to refrence).

This is comedy gold! I almost didn't spot the sarcasm :-D

TazeTSchnitzel6• 11 years ago

All the existing math functions are global. If you add a new one, it's only fitting that it is global too. Having one and only one math function namespaced would be inconsistent.

trebor• 11 years ago

Not to mention, if they namespaced all math functions it'd break backward compatibility badly. Given that no core PHP functions are namespaced, I don't see why they should start now.

Also, with the functions in the global namespace you can implement a namespaced copy that takes precedence within the namespace and its children. It can easily confuse people, but I've seen it used to force people away from string functions to their multibyte equivalents (it threw exceptions).

debacle3• 11 years ago

The internals list has a weird combination of die hard "PHP is PHP" people who really prefer for things to not change even if they are bad.

defenestration• 11 years ago

Congratulations to the PHP community with this milestone!

I wonder if people who switched to HHVM, will start using PHP again. HHVM has offered much faster performance than previous versions of PHP. The speed of PHP 7 is at par with HHVM.

mtbcoder• 11 years ago

I may be wrong, but I would assume most teams/individuals who made the decision to implement HHVM did so to use Hack and all of its features.

castell2• 11 years ago

HHVM is still a bit faster than PHP7 in most benchmarks (wordpress, etc.). HHVM has also JIT and consumes less memory per request. Though PHP7 is more backward compatible with real word PHP5 code bases and is easier to install.

drakonka• 11 years ago

Congratulations and thank you to everybody who has contributed. I've been running PHP 7 for my hobby project for the last couple of months. The update was refreshingly painless and I've had zero compatibility troubles so far.

longwave3• 11 years ago

The performance improvements in this release will hopefully encourage people to upgrade, even if the new features don't. Common PHP applications run 70%-100% faster on PHP 7 than they did on PHP 5.6, comparable with or better than HHVM.

Kartificial• 11 years ago

That sounds amazing, do you have any sources / benchmarks to back this up?

Jgrubb3• 11 years ago

My own anecdotal evidence - I couldn't believe how fast our Drupal 7 websites were, and they only threw a couple of deprecation notices. They definitely felt 100% faster. We will be upgrading soon.

monk_e_boy2• 11 years ago

https://kinsta.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/hhvm-php7-benc...

longwave3• 11 years ago

http://www.zend.com/en/resources/php7_infographic

MichaelApproved• 11 years ago

The performance increase is what I'm looking forward to most with 7. I can't wait to see how several of my code-heavy WordPress installations do with 7. From the benchmarks I've seen, it's going to be incredible.

Specifically, I'm hoping the page load times will be cut in half.

mrmondo• 11 years ago

As a person with more of an ops background can someone explain to me why / when PHP might be a viable language? My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues and I think that often in the past PHP was often a language for designers that didn't have experienced programming skills, it feels like designers have now shifted to using Node for this?

ianhawes• 11 years ago

It depends on whats being hosted. If you're dealing with legacy apps that were built in the PHP 5.2 or even PHP 4 days, be afraid. Be very afraid.

If you're dealing with more mainstream PHP apps like WordPress or Magento, its important to stay up on the core updates but also monitor the plugins and templates being installed. The majority of the attack surface on those apps is in the plugins because they're almost never audited.

As for modern customer apps, written in frameworks like Laravel or Symfony, you're usually fine. Those frameworks are on par with Django and Rails in being very hard to shoot yourself with.

castell2• 11 years ago

legacy apps that were built in the PHP 5.2 or even PHP 4 days, be afraid. Be very afraid

BS. Most PHP4 code runs just fine, as do PHP5 code. Almost no one used object oriented code in PHP4 days (it was slow!), so the incompatible changes aren't a problem. And all you need to do is to search and replace some function names like mysql_* to mysqli_*. Most old code bases from PHP4 days also didn't rely on frameworks at all and were completely written from scratch or copy&pasted together - actually an advantage in this case.

Upgrading an old Python or Ruby code from 1.x/2.x days is a lot of more work (as it always includes upgrading to a recent framework version) than upgrading from PHP4 or PHP5 to PHP7.

gkwelding• 11 years ago

"My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues"

Unfortunately PHP seems to have this reputation. It's not so much the language that is the problem but the people using it. PHP typically had such a low bar to entry that literally anyone could pick it up and do anything and everything with it. And quite frankly there were (and still are) a lot of beginner tutorials out there encouraging people to do very stupid insecure stuff. It now seems to be an image that stuck.

If you take a look at the OWASP Top 10, and any big data breaches recently, they are all caused by human error. SQL injection being the major culprit.

ams61103• 11 years ago

fending off security issues

This is my general experience with all platforms and operating systems. You have to keep up to date.

PHP was early on the web scene, and like ASP it encouraged a lot of bad practices (like concatenating user input into SQL strings) before people knew better.

These days, in the hands of a competent developer, it's no worse than any other mainstream stack as far as security goes.

acdha4• 11 years ago

That explanation is technically true but it's like blaming human error for factory workers being injured by a machine without safety guards. Since it happens so frequently you have to ask how the language could change to make it less common.

Most of it comes down to being developed ad-hoc with convenience for solving a simple problem right now as the main driving force.

Remember register globals? That was a minor convenience which took ages and millions of exploits to be removed – I remember lobbying for that in the late 90s.

Similarly, you mentioned SQL injection. Unlikely as this may seem now, there was a time when things like prepared statements were an exotic new feature with limited library support and a certain school of programmer thought they were probably too slow. The docs and most tutorials didn't mention things like validation or escaping prominently so most PHP developers were trained to slop everything into strings. When PDO came along, this persisted for too long as well and even after they started recommending placeholders you didn't get something like all of the mysql functions saying “Don't use this, it's unsafe”. I've heard that this has improved but it's been years since I needed to look.

Similarly, look at the lax attitudes toward error handling — errors are ignored by default, database errors or warnings have to be explicitly requested, etc. That's “easier”, saving whole seconds of learning at the expense of millions of successful exploits and hours spent debugging.

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

Not the language?

PHP is the only lasting language where making code that allows SQL injection is easier than code that forbids it.

PHP includes all the worst practices you'll find on any languages. Javascript has the eval problem - PHP has it too; Perl have the too fluid type system where you can't specify anything - PHP too, except that it lacks Perl's tainted mode; Asp made it easier to create code subject to XSS than code that isn't and is subject to directory traversal - guess what, PHP copied it... and the list goes on and on.

This release fixes still some more problems, but PHP will never become a good language.

gaius• 11 years ago

language for designers that didn't have experienced programming skills

A history lesson: PHP was originally known as PHP/FI which meant "personal home page form interpreter". That people started using it for "real work" took everyone by surprise, including the author!

http://php.net/manual/phpfi2.php#history

Joeri2• 11 years ago

PHP historically had the advantage of being really easy to program for with limited knowledge, while still being powerful enough to let you evolve from small hobby projects to big enterprise web apps. Python and Ruby became popular for similar reasons, but they were harder to host, so PHP kept an edge. I would say that today go and node.js have similar programmability advantages, as well as eclipsing PHP performance-wise, but as long as they're not universally available from shared web hosts PHP will have a niche.

allan_s• 11 years ago

The scalar and return types are really a great improvement IMHO, I can't wait for Doctrine to fully support it for code generation.

But one thing which is missing is the nullable types, as currently it's either you always return a string and you can use scalar typing, or you sometimes return null and you can't use it (which I'm okay with)

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullable_types https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1045

With this, it will permit to have even better static analysis "a la" HHVM/hack (i.e detecting that you haven't check for is_null in your code

jimaek2• 11 years ago

Cant wait for php-memcache and a few other extensions to support PHP7 to move our projects

Jgrubb3• 11 years ago

I was waiting and waiting for this as well, but checked homebrew during RC6 and there was a PHP70-memcached, so I took that to mean it had finally caught up?

McGlockenshire• 11 years ago

ext/memcache is not the same thing as ext/memcached.

Yup, there are two, and they are entirely different.

One uses the historic library, the other uses the new library. Why they decided to do it this way is beyond me.

mei0Iesh4• 11 years ago

Yay, null coalesce operator! That shortens a lot of common redundancy. When will there be a FreeBSD port?

datashovel2• 11 years ago

The one thing I'd love to see is a native concurrency story with PHP. I'd put my vote in specifically to have Communicating Sequential Processes. I think that feature alone would take the language to another level. I know they've got stream_select, et al. and I've really enjoyed pecl event, reactphp, and of course there's HackLang's Async / Await if you want to convert, but having some modern / native constructs would be nice to have. Does anyone know if that's on the horizon?

debacle3• 11 years ago

PHP has pthreads which are slowly becoming a real thing. There are a few relatively non-minor stumbling blocks in the way, but I imagine that it'll be only 12-18 months between when it can be a priority and when it'll be part of PHP. I expect you'll be able to do true concurrency in PHP in the next ~3 years.

datashovel2• 11 years ago

Ah yes, thanks for reminding me. I do recall coming across this project in the past, but never followed its progress. For some reason I decided against exploring further. I think it may have been disclaimers that stated it was still experimental (even though pecl had it listed as stable).

dutchbrit• 11 years ago

Cool stuff, PHP 7 looks very promising, especially when it comes to speed. In some cases even faster than HHVM.

cdnsteve3• 11 years ago

I'm actually excited for this release!

- Type declarations (this is a HUGE move forwards).

- Grouped use statements, not sure if I like how that looks

- ?? will shorten statements

- Anonymous classes seem a bit odd looking to me

- Unserialize filter is a nice security bump

Anxious to try it out and see the speed improvements I've been hearing about too.

mjrpes2• 11 years ago

Anonymous classes are very cool and have a lot of potential uses, which are mentioned at the bottom of the RFC:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/anonymous_classes

velmu• 11 years ago

Excellent!

cdnsteve3• 11 years ago

Stuff like this hurts: https://www.drupal.org/node/2454439

onli• 11 years ago

It really does. I work partly on a 10 year old PHP software. PHP 7 has apart from some other breakages some changes in the evaluation order that I expect to break everything. Thankfully related to objects, so with a bit of luck it will mostly hit the bundled libs (the project of course does not use objects for its own structure) which can then be exchanged or maybe will get updates.

Lots of work.

geerlingguy2• 11 years ago

Of note: that issue has been ongoing for months, and most of the issues that were found were fixed in PHP core within a few days/weeks. Drupal 8's test suite even caught one regression that delayed the PHP 7.0.0 final release a few weeks!

Most modern PHP apps will work on PHP 7.0.0 with little or no extra effort, but if you have a large legacy app, and haven't ever turned on error logging, you may need to fix a bunch of deprecated code usage!

randomname2• 11 years ago

Why? It says there is a 100% test pass rate on PHP7.

lsaferite• 11 years ago

I was so excited when I saw this post. Then I realized it's another 'too early' post claiming the tag == release. It's not released until it happens on the PHP site. This is just a tag in the repo. Sure, it likely won't change now, but it could.

jneal• 11 years ago

Correct, it's not likely to change at this point. Official release is slated for Dec 3 according to their Twitter[1], so it appears they are getting everything ready to launch.

[1] https://twitter.com/official_php/status/669940548128534528

Practicality3• 11 years ago

Indeed, the GA release date is tomorrow: https://wiki.php.net/todo/php70#timetable

TazeTSchnitzel6• 11 years ago

It's not uncommon for released to be re-tagged, too.

feld• 11 years ago

and if you do this you deserve to burn in a fiery pit for being a bad bad bad release manager

If you tag a commit you better stick to your guns and never change it. You can't just re-tag or re-roll your releases because you found a bug. Bugs happen. Increment your version number, cut/tag a new release, and move on. You will never have a perfect release. Ever.

mjrpes2• 11 years ago

PHP 7 has been very stable, but a serious bug was discovered close to launch that made them delay the release by two weeks. There have been no serious issues found since that time, so release should be imminent.

captn3m02• 11 years ago

Have been waiting for this anxiously. I've been running a few test builds on it occasionally, but its nice to have the guarantee to shift prod systems to it.

New Features list is at https://secure.php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.ph...

My favorite is scalar typehinting by far.

circa• 11 years ago

I haven't worked with PHP in quite some time now but I am happy to see its still kicking. Although it does bring back some haunting memories from versions 3 and 4.

sarciszewski12• 11 years ago

The feature I'm most excited about is the availability of a simple, sane, and correct CSPRNG:

    string random_bytes(int $numBytes);
    int random_int(int $min, int $max);

If you want to use this interface in a project that needs to be compatible with PHP 5, there's always https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat

motiejus• 11 years ago

OK, great! Clicking the main page[1], see the top of README:

"build error".

Wait, what? You just released it, it should definitely work! Clicking that icon[2], checking the failed build[3]:

ERROR: no certificate subject alternative name matches

requested host name `pear.php.net'.

To connect to pear.php.net insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'.

Really? See what's in http://pear.php.net/

The server running pear.php.net had a fatal hard disk failure and gets replaced by a new machine this week. Until the new machine is setup, this page is up to let you continue installing PEAR packages via the PEAR installer.

In 2015? Cool.

Connecting to the https website ...

% openssl s_client -connect pear.php.net:443 ... Certificate chain 0 s:/CN=mail.cweiske.de

So you're using CN=mail.cweiske.de for pear.php.net. I don't even know what to say.. Well, happy hacking!

[1] https://github.com/php/php-src [2]: https://travis-ci.org/php/php-src [3]: https://travis-ci.org/php/php-src/jobs/94372493

untog3• 11 years ago

They didn't release it. They just tagged it in GitHub. The HN title is wrong.

jhall1468• 11 years ago

In 2015? Cool.

Do you actually think there's a point in time where mechanical hard drives are going to last forever? If so I have a bridge to sell you.

nkantar• 11 years ago

I'd wager it's commentary on the lack of redundancy that would allow such an important resource to be unavailable.

Hard disks fail, but if you're hosting something important on them, you might want more than one (to grossly oversimplify things).

wtetzner3• 11 years ago

% openssl s_client -connect pear.php.net:443 ... Certificate chain 0 s:/CN=mail.cweiske.de
So you're using CN=mail.cweiske.de for pear.php.net. I don't even know what to say.. Well, happy hacking!

Yeah, but it's cool that they used Let's Encrypt.

sarciszewski12• 11 years ago

By the way, PHP 7 has been tagged but not yet released.

oblio5• 11 years ago

Can anyone closer to the subject provide some info about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3v4l98/php_7_r...?

That comment looks a bit scary if it's true :(

adrianmacneil2• 11 years ago

Given how dependent php is on hosts to upgrade, and how slow php hosts traditionally move, it would seem that php would benefit from a 7-to-5 transpiler, similar to Babel for JS. Does anything like this exist already?

giaour• 11 years ago

Honestly, bigger PHP sites aren't dependent on hosts but on Linux distributions for staying up to date. Once there's an AMI of Amazon Linux and an Ubuntu LTS shipping with PHP7, there should be a huge upswing in adoption.

ausjke• 11 years ago

Been learning php on and off for a while, happy to see this release is out. Most likely I will use PHP for my future projects instead of the alternatives.

Languages are learning from each other these days, the new PHP definitely benefited from this trend and is actively evolving itself, which is the major reason I'm to stick with it.

Some PHP developers recommended nodejs over PHP for the future to me, after a few experience I feel PHP may be better for long-term maintenance. Renovation is good, it's just that javascript may have too much of it for me to chew on nowadays.

Wish there will be a light-weight version of PHP, something like micropython or Lua, so I can use it on low-end systems when needed. PHP is still very demanding on resources comparing to other languages, even nodejs can be used on IoT devices with restricted mem/cpu power.

debacle3• 11 years ago

A very lost opportunity to create a new stdlib and eventually phase out the old, shitty, procedural one.

samuell• 11 years ago

To me, PHP is still interesting, because of the ProcessWire CMS/CMF [1], which is basically the next best thing afte sliced bread (A generic hierarchical content structure, with a jquery-inspired PHP template API, giving FULL flexibility to customize your design and presentation to anything you like ... even REST apis are just a few lines of code in a template. Add to that dozens of dozens of extremely nicec features built in, such as automatic thumbnail resize through API methods such as <img src="{$image->size(90,90)->url}"> ... and you have something immensely powerful).

[1] http://processwire.com

ck22• 11 years ago

PHP 7 literally cuts the load in half for PHP code which means hundreds of thousands of servers can either now save power or serve nearly twice the number of connections.

win-win

almost as fast as hhvm but much easier to adapt

jpmw• 11 years ago

I left the PHP community years ago, but...but...where is PHP 6? What was the reason to skip it?

wnevets• 11 years ago

IIRC this release is so different from the planned 6 release they thought it would be confusing to people who bought/read those PHP6 books.

Acconut• 11 years ago

Funnily, there is no PHP 6. While work had begun for this version, it was later abandoned due to some major issues regarding Unicode handling, as far as I know. Most of the features already implemented in PHP 6 were shipped in PHP 5.4 and they continued with PHP 7 in order to avoid confusion.

jjuhl4• 11 years ago

Why, ohh why, won't this freak of nature (language) just die :-(

jeremiep• 11 years ago

I've recently found this gem: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I haven't laughed this much in a long while. PHP was my first language and indeed I got far away as soon as I knew any better.

codewithcheese• 11 years ago

I don't use PHP anymore. However, if you want to web program it really is the easiest to get started. So many of my friends who have no interested in programming but want to do simple web stuff learn how to setup apache with PHP and copy paste what they need.

MAGZine2• 11 years ago

Because it's actually not bad for anyone who has written PHP 5.4+ with a modern framework.

Yes.

Good.

jjuhl4• 11 years ago

It may solve your immediate problem. But it's dangerous - there are too many hidden gotchas and situations where you have to know the actual implementation (which can change) to know what it does. It also breaks a lot of conventions established by most other languages, so you really have to be really careful when assuming that "this probably works like I expect" - you may get nasty surprises). Ohh and it's pretty slow compared to other languages (like C++, Lua & Python - just to name a few). And that's not even mentioning the fact that the people implementing it seem to be a case of the "blind leading the blind". Just search for how they tried to fix an integer overflow by testing if "foo>intmax" etc - that's just the tip of the iceberg (who the hell thought that converting strings to integers before comparing them was a good idea?) etc etc. Those guys should not be allowed near language design. So yeah; it's pretty bad.

awalGarg• 11 years ago

Great release! I think the BC breaks are all justified :)

And all the shared hosts around still stuck at 5.3 or so, this is your time to move forward. At least start offering a PHP7 version, if not a straightway upgrade.

Huge thanks to the internals for their hard work.

gustavofulton• 11 years ago

Is it the final release now?

GigabyteCoin• 11 years ago

Are they skipping 6.X releases or something?

The latest release according to php.net [0] is 5.6.15 which come out October 29th of 2015.

[0] https://secure.php.net/releases/

Jemaclus• 11 years ago

For a long time, there was a PHP6 in the works, but then HHVM and Hack came around and started making PHP6 look bad. There was another fork called PHP-NG, I believe, which went in a different direction. There was a huge pissing match in the internals list, and in the end, I think they threw threw out most of the PHP6 proposals and started fresh. To clear up matters, they skipped PHP6 and called it PHP7.

Don't quote me on that, but that's my understanding of it.

martin_• 11 years ago

The primary reasons for skipping PHP6 were that several books had been published on what PHP6 was supposed to be (full unicode support, for example), talks had been given and the original php 6 branch was ultimately ditched. The full list of reasons are at: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php6

jwdunne• 11 years ago

I've been anticipating this for a while. Some great additions, especially scalar type hinting and type hinting on return types. The ability to enable stricter typing via a directive is also great. It's a shame internals voted down short-hand syntax for anonymous functions, including implicit closure over outer scope variables - a function with closures in PHP can get ugly very fast. Using higher-order functions becomes far more unwieldy.

timmy_2• 11 years ago

I use PHP for my freelance work mainly because I have no option on hosting. I never got the appeal for PHP (besides being cheap to host). All my personal projects are either done in Python or Node + (Angular, react & now Vue)

Python: PURE elegance

Node: io breeze

PHP: ?

Q: is the "module" system still achieved by dumping file content or is there a linking system?

profmonocle2• 11 years ago

Just curious, why do you have no option on hosting? I got into PHP many years ago for this exact reason - it was the easiest language to use on low-cost shared hosting. But these days you can get a decent VPS (where you have root and can use any language) for $10-$15 a month, which is exactly what I used to consider "low-cost hosting".

timmy_2• 11 years ago

I live in Africa & $10 * 12 = $120/year is way too expensive --- when I say cheap, I'm talking about $3/month (shared, 20GB bandwidth, 1GB storage, MySQL / PgSql)

Hostgator, Godaddy...

josu• 11 years ago

What effect will this have on Wordrpess?

geerlingguy2• 11 years ago

My best guess it Wordpress will still use it's PHP4-style architecture for years to come, until it's entirely rewritten in JS at some point.

darkhorn• 11 years ago

It has not been released yet.

sarciszewski12• 11 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10672307

MrBra• 11 years ago

When years ago I started learning Ruby and wanted to use it for the web, my intention was using it like you do with PHP (simply including it in HTML) but I got a bit frustrated because all the resources I kept finding showed the only way of using Ruby in a web context was by using a big framework like Rails or, by choosing a wrong path and playing with stuff which required a lot more in depth knowledge that I did not have (and that I didn't want to be forced to have because I just wanted to focus on app code and experiment).

I only recently discovered https://github.com/migrs/rack-server-pages which allows to simply shove Ruby in HTML the same way as PHP and as a new Ruby dev could expect to be able to do. I think this approach makes learning projects simpler, and at the same has the added value of making people actually learn a lot about those aspects of HTTP that frameworks keep well hidden under their carpet and that can help you become a good web developer instead of "simply" a framework user.

Yes for sure, best practices that frameworks implement are there for a reason, and it's great to have them, but IMHO, this approach has advantages when learning and could also be seen as an essential step to understand what those frameworks you will use next are abstracting and why.

IMHO, what still contributes to new generations of devs approaching PHP, is also its immediateness and simplicity with nothing to do except '<?php' code '?>' and with this comment I just wanted to give a bit more exposure to the fact that a similar solution exists for Ruby too, and that it's a bit of a pity that because of the importance of Rails it got a bit overshadowed.

PHP 7 Released

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