For seven consecutive years, PHP has been the fourth most popular programming language in the world, powering more than 200 million websites, with more than 81.7 percent of public websites.
PHP this took a huge leap week with the first major change since 2004, when version 5.0 was released.
The new version 7 has an overall improved performance, estimated to be up to three times higher than the latest PHP 5.6 according to some benchmarks.
It also features other smaller changes, such as significantly reduced memory usage, return type declarations, spaceship operator, and more.
PHP 7 contains a number of changes, such as the removal of PHP safe mode, magic quotes, a number of new reserved keywords, and more.
While PHP 7 is now available, it will likely take some time before it is widely adopted by developers and web developers. Web applications tend to upgrade to new versions after years.
However, the performance improvements brought by version 7 are quite large, and this will tempt manufacturers to make corresponding upgrades much earlier than usual.
