Major Differences Between PHP 5.x and PHP 7.x

The version only made it to the testing phase but never got to the stable version.

When PHP 7 was released, a lot of people compared it with the previous version. Below is a detailed comparison of the significant differences between PHP 5 and PHP 7, which we believe will be beneficial to you.

Performance

Have you heard about Facebook HVVM? It is meant to provide maximum performance for the PHP based application. Hence, there was an idea generated by PHPNG (PHP NextGen) to provide as much maximum performance as Facebook provides. ZEND led the performance improvement source to enable the speed up PHP based applications as long as the Zend performance improvement is enormous. By upgrading to PHP7, you can achieve optimum performance, even without changing a single piece of code. Another aspect of PHP7 performance improvement is the depreciation of many redundant features.

Twice the speed

The significant performance improvement is one of the most noticeable advantage that the new PHPNG possess. The PHPNG development team refactored the Zend Engine and the optimized memory usage.

What were the results? The use of PHP 7 ensures that your code runs faster. You will automatically need fewer servers to serve the same level of users.

Facilitates error handling

One challenges PHP coders face is the handling of fatal and catchable fatal errors. With the new Engine Exceptions, such errors can be replaced with exceptions. Unless the exception is caught, PHP will always return same fatal errors just like it is doing in the current 5.X series.

Declaring the return type

It is impossible for a programmer to define the return type of a method or function in PHP 5. This is the major setback in real life coding scenario because the programmers could not avoid unwanted return types and generate exceptions as a replacement. Luckily, programmers can declare the return type of the function following the expected return value. It is expected that the code will become accurate and robust as a result. Return types are divided into four segments which are: int, bool, string, and float.

Summary

Recent changes of PHP versions rendered the concept of PHP a more matured language. These latest PHP versions are a good point of call that will assist all PHP developers and help them to build awesome enterprise level applications.