PHP 7.0 new features (and new interpreter)

What’s New in PHP 7.0A the only reason why it’s worth upgrading

Andrea TelatinBMR Genomics srl

Overview and why to switch

About this release

• Released on December 3, 2015

• Major release after 11 years

• Two years in development

• New Zend Engine

What happened to 6.0?• Had the goal to support Unicode everywhere

• Too ambitious?Goal dropped, yet after 5 years of conferences, blogs, …

• Features of “6.0” entered in the 5.x

• namespaces, closures, short array syntax…

Performance PHP 7.0 has significantly better performance

• Probably the only reason to upgrade.

• Optimized parsing, and lower memory ~2X faster

• Compares with HHVM (FaceBook)

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

New Features

Type hinting

• Specify the type of function arguments

• Can be done in three ways: none, coercitive, strict

• Types available: int, string, bool, array, float

• I think will be super cool for IDEs,…

Type hinting• Specify the type of function arguments

• Can be done in three ways: none, coercitive or strict

function SumNumbers($first, $second) {echo $first . " (". gettype($first) . " + \n";echo $second ." (". gettype($second). " = \n";$result = $first + $second;echo $result ." (". gettype($result).")\n";

}

Type hintingSumNumbers(1, 5); SumNumbers(1.0, 5.0); // What happens?SumNumbers(“1”, “5”); // What happens?

• Coercitive declaration:function SumNumbers(int $first,int $second) { …// PHP immediately convert input into integers

• Strict declaration:declare(strict_type=1);function SumNumbers(int $first,int $second) { …// error if we don’t pass integer (type error)

Return type declaration

• Specify the type of what we return from functions

• Again can be done in three ways: none, coercitive, strict

• Again types available: int, string, bool, array, float

Return type declaration• Coercive (convert the result if needed) function SumNumbers($first, $second): int {

$result = $first + $second; return $result;}

• Strict (return error if the type doesn’t match)declare(strict_types = 1);function SumNumbers($first, $second): int {

return $first + $second;}

New function intdiv()

• Yes, its for integer division

echo intdiv(4, 3);// Always return an int. // More precision avoiding float! // compare with floor($bignum/2);

• Completes the modulus operator

Uniform variable syntax• When we used variable variable-names:

$var_name = 'FirstName';$FirstName = 'Andrea';$Person = ('Name' => 'Andrea', 'Surname' => 'Telatin');

echo $$var_name; // prints Andreaecho $$Person['Name']; // Illegal in PHP5, valid in 7

• Can be used for nested variables

Unicode

• A codepoint represents a character/symbol/emoji

• Encoded as hex number, eg 2603 is

• In PHP is like print "Hello from \u{2603}"

• \u{1F600} = 😀

Catch exceptions: PHP 5function getGeneCoord($ensembleID) {

if (isnull($ensembleID) {throw new Exception('No ID provided');

}return $ensembleID->cordinates;

}

try {print getGeneCoord($id)."\n";

} catch (Exception $e) {echo "Raised exception: $e\n";

}

Catch exceptions: PHP 7function getGeneCoord($ensembleID) {

if (isnull($ensembleID) {throw new Exception('No ID provided');

}return $ensembleID->cordinates;

}

try {print getGeneCoord($id)."\n";

} catch (Error $e) {echo "Raised exception: $e\n";

}

Other new features• Anonymous classes in OOP: quick, one-time use

classes (omit class name)$instance = new class { … }

• Null coalescent operator: ?? Return the first not-null value in a series $username = $db[name] ?? $default;

• Spaceship operator: <=>// -1 if <, 0 if ==, 1 if >… Useful in switch

and more!

Deprecated things

PHP 4 constructors

• Class with a method with the same name as the class. Called during creation.

• Since PHP 5 the common practice is calling the method _constructor()

Deleted things

Alternative PHP marks• The standard tags are

<?php code here ?>

• Deleted alternatives:<% ASP style %><%= ASP style with echo %> <script language="php"> html style </script>

• Short open tags still OK but will they for long? <?= … ?>

Other deletions

• ereg_ functions to preg_ functions

• mysql_ functions to mysqli_ functions

• mcrypt_generic_end, mcrypt_cbc……..

Timezone warnings

• PHP5 fired a warning if you didn’t set date.timezone in PHP.ini file (default was UTC)

• Default is still UTC, but warning removed