PHP 7 Impactful Changes

Patrick Devins• Developer/Architect at American Cable and

Telephone

• 4 yrs. PHP Development | 10+ yrs. in the Industry (Server Management, Sales, Service, Operations, etc.)

• 6+ yrs. Experience varying levels of management

• Airboat enjoyer, bad fisherman, and outdoorsman.

• Ignored on Twitter @pddevins, lurking on Instagram as thepoddster, rarely on LinkedIn and too old for Facebook as myself.

PHP 7: Context

• What is PHP and why should I consider building my next project with it?

• Why PHP 7 and not PHP 6?

• PHP 7 originates from PHPNG (PHP NextGeneration)

• More performant

• Complete compatibility with the original Zend Engine

• “Is this talk for me?”

PHP 7

Timeline

Scalar Types

Existing types • array : array(), […] • <Objects> : stdClass, Exception, Iterator • callable : lambda functions, __invoke(), class/method

Adds new types

• int : Integers; 1, 2, 3, etc. (integer alias has been removed)

• float : Floats/Decimals; 5, 100.32, 3.141592

• bool : Boolean; true, false (boolean alias has been removed)

• string : Strings; ‘Patrick’, ‘active’, ‘company vehicle’

Scalar Type Hints and Return Types

• Introduces Strict and Coercive modes

• declare(strict_types=1); (value can be 1 or 0)

• Defaults to Coercive mode (existing behavior)

• Must be the first declaration in the file

• If included later in the file, it will generate a compile error

Development Advantages• Assists in testing by reducing code complexity

and unnecessary checks for coercive types

• “if (!is_numeric($var)) { … }”

• Provide failsafes for producing better quality code

• Prevent sub-types from breaking the expected return type of the super-type1), especially in interfaces

• Prevent unintended return values

• Document return type information in a way that is not easily invalidated (unlike comments)

Business Advantages• Higher quality code requires less

maintenance by reducing technical debt.

• Built in language features can speed up development cycles (or provide extended time for writing tests and improving overall QA) by simplifying common as well as complex tasks.

• Simplifying complex tasks provides a better platform for feature requests and issue reporting through project managers like JIRA, Asana, or Github Issues.

New Operators

• Null Coalesce [??]

• Checking for null

• typically done with isset()

• tedious and repetative

• Combined Comparison (“Spaceship”) [<=>]

• compares two values

• returns 0, 1, or -1

• primarily used for sorting

Null Coalesce

• Traditional snippet:

• if (isset($var)) { return $var;} else { return $b;}

• Ternary version:

• isset($var) ? $var : $b;

• New syntax:

• $var ?? $b;

Combined or “Three-way” Comparison / “Spaceship”

• Traditionally:

• usort($someList, function($first, $second) { if ($first == $second) { return 0; } return ($first > $second) ? 1 : -1;});

• New syntax:

• usort($someList, function($first, $second) { return $first <=> $second;});

Development Advantages• Assists by reducing code complexity

through more concise syntax

• Readability is significantly increased

• Some details

• Similar to strcmp() or version_compare()

• it has the same precedence as == and !=

Business Advantages• Higher quality code requires less

maintenance by reducing technical debt.

• Built in language features can speed up development cycles (or provide extended time for writing tests and improving overall QA) by simplifying common as well as complex tasks.

• Simplifying complex tasks provides a better platform for feature requests and issue reporting through project managers like JIRA, Asana, or Github Issues.

Performance Something everyone loves

Performance Benchmark Comparison

October 14th, 2014 : Andi Gutmans Co-founder of Zend, PHP Co-architect

Recent Benchmarks

Test Box Specs • Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H i7-4771

4 cores @ 3.50GHz w/ 16G of Ram @ 1600MHz

• Hyperthreading enabled for a total of 8 virtual cores

• Toshiba THNSNHH256GBST SSD

• Linux debian 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt9-2 (2015-04-13) x86_64 GNU/Linux

• MySQL 5.6.24

• nginx-1.6.2 + php-fpm for all testsunless indicated otherwise

• Quiet local 100Mbps network

• siege benchmark tool run from a separate machine

* Not performed on same test machine, but values are comparable

7.0 - dev 5.6

Drupal7.27* 490 r/s 310 r/s

Drupal8 - git 2580 r/s 1401 r/s

WordPress4.1 604 r/s 270 r/s

Development Advantages• Faster turnover for all tasks:

• Running test suites

• Running VMs

• Browser testing

• Faster is pretty much better, amirite?

Business Advantages• PHP 7 is lighter on memory and processing

which correlates directly to servers needed for running web applications.

• The more req/sec we can handle, the less need there is to scale earlier.

• In larger applications, it may be possible to push out the need to optimize. This opens up the opportunity to guide development toward providing more features for customers/consumers or handle squash more bugs.

Other Considerations• Many of the functions that have been flagged

as E_DEPRECATED from PHP 4.x have been deleted. See https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_deprecated_functionality_in_php7for more info.

• New reserved words (mostly scalars, but some others)

• All old script tags and ASP style tags support has been removed

• Closure::call

• Group use declarations

• Engine Exceptions for catching recoverable fatal errors.

• Generator Return Expressions and Delegation

• Unicode Codepoint Escape Syntax (“\u{CODEPOINT}”)

• Consistency fixes:

• $obj->$property[‘name’];

• php < 7

• $obj->{$property[‘name’]}

• php 7 +

• {$obj->$property}[‘name’]

That’s all, PHPolks.

Questions?