PHP5 vs PHP7 – What Makes Php7 Beneficial Over Php5
Because of the flexibility PHP provides to its users, it has been used by more than 80% of websites. It’s a great ratio which is increasing at a rapid state and expected to cover a huge landscape in the web development market.
Websites based on PHP must be using PHP5 and that’s perfectly fine. But, if you want exceptional features and modernity in your existing website, you need to upgrade yourself in some aspects.
Here, the best and the quickstep you can take is to update the website with new PHP7 by your developers. If you are not following PHP closely or you are new to PHP programming, you should know that before PHP 7, PHP 5.6 used to be the stable version.
It is quite surprising to many to learn that the company avoided releasing PHP 6 because PHP 6 was out for testing but it never really got a stable version.
Differences That Are Major Between Php 5 and Php 7
Performance
The performance of PHP 7 and PHP 5 is a major difference. Supposing that you have written a PHP code in PHP 5, if you run the same code in both the versions, the performance of PHP 7 will be significantly higher than PHP 5. PHP is powered by Zend engine even since the release of PHP 4.
PHP 5 uses Zend II but PHP 7 uses a brand new model of engine called PHP-NG or Next Generation. Here This PHPNG engine improves the performance as much as twice with optimized memory usage and makes the user experience the most convenient.
Declaring The Return Type
Normally In PHP 5, the programmer cannot define the return type of a function or method.
This has been a huge drawback in the real-life coding scenario as the programmers were unable to prevent unwanted return types and generate exceptions in otherwise case.
Fortunately, PHP 7 allows programmers to declare the return type of the functions as per the expected return value.
Error Handling and 64-bit Support
Being a programmer you might be aware that PHP 5 does not support 64-bit integer or large files but the scenario has changed in PHP 7.
PHP 7 has 64-bit support due to which you will be able to use native 64-bit integers as well as large files and hence, you can run applications flawlessly on 64-bit system architectures.
Anonymous Class
Normally one of the major additions to PHP 7 which is not present in PHP 5 is the anonymous class.
Even though PHP had object-oriented approach from PHP 5 but it lacked this feature which is very common in other popular object-oriented languages like Java and C#.
An anonymous class is used to speed up the execution time. It is suitable when you do not need to execute a class more than once and you do not need to document it in the project document.
New Operators
PHP 7 comes with a new operator that had been the center of attention when the stable version of PHP 7 came out.
It is called spaceship operator that comes with the notation <=> and in the technical term, you can call it combined comparison or three-way comparison operator.
The developers are finding the operator extremely useful and they are using it in sorting and various combined comparisons. Generally It works the same as strcmp() and it is considered to be a replacement for the library function version_compare().
It returns 0 when the operands are equal and 1 when the left side is greater than the right and -1 in case of the opposite. Now If you are used to Perl and Ruby, the operator is already present there.
Miscellaneous
PHP 7 comes with Group Use Declaration according to which, the programmers will be able to include classes from the same namespace.
This is going to save a lot of typing time and will make the code look crisp and readable and debugging will also be easier.
Great Load Bearing Capacity
After the introduction of PHP7,generally developers have witnessed a great shift in the performance of websites and applications.
They added, here working with the new version provides the liberty to enable hosts which makes the entire PHP scripting run smoothly.
Hosts enabling not only ends up making performance seamless but also it hosts a number of customers at the same time using a single hardware.
Even PHP7 is running flawlessly for Facebook HHVM which generally operates on JIT (Just In Time) compiler and complies code to the right direction.
Return Types
If you are a coding buff, you must have known about return types which have been used in other programming languages for better scripting. Now, these have been officially introduced in PHP7 which makes it easy for developers to specify the type of variable a scripted function should return.
Here, the developers need to specify the return type after closing parenthesis of an argument. The appropriate syntax be like:
function foo(): array {
return [];
}
Here, you can clearly understand that the function “foo” is returning an array as an output.
This functionality is not available in previous PHP versions which means that most of the technical readers may not understand what output the function is supposed to provide after final code execution.
With PHP7 developers can explicitly declare the return types which give the code a quickly understandable format.
Spaceship Operator
Spaceship Operators (< = >) also pronounced as Combined Comparison Operators are used to compare two expressions in a well-aligned code. This is extremely new and the best function developers can reap advantages from.
PHP users are now free to use this operator to complement the code and make it more perfect to understand.
Elaborating the syntax states – the operator returns -1 if the left operand is less than the right one. It denotes 0 if the value of both the operands are equal and 1 if the left operand contains larger value than the right one.
This is a simple function which can be seamlessly used to clearly denote integers, floats and arrays.
Asynchronous Programming Support
With previous PHP5 versions, it was daunting to simultaneously run different activities.
PHP7 has completely resolved this problem as this allows seamless execution of a variety of tasks. One can do access to the database, networking, set timers and also perform several I/O operations at the same time and without any interruption.
As the new version supports multi-threading operational environment which ultimately makes it suitable to handle simultaneous requests from the server.
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