Why Upgrading to PHP 7 Website is a Wise Idea?

PHP 7 is undoubtedly the most dramatic update to PHP in over a decade, bringing dramatically  reduced memory consumption, explosive performance improvements as well as a many other exciting features. If you don’t upgrade from a slow PHP 5 one to a speedy PHP 7, you would definitely be left behind.

The best feature of PHP 7 is its massively improved performance, with up to 3 times better performance than the old PHP 5.6. Not only this, it also cuts memory consumption by almost 50%, as it handles data with a more efficient structure. Other smaller changes that it features are return type declarations, the spaceship operator, etc.

PHP 7 also contains a number of breaking changes, like magic quotes, the removal of PHP safe mode, a number of new reserved keywords & others.

Take a look at the top 5 features of PHP 7 here:

Improved performance

Performance is one of the biggest reasons why you should consider upgrading to PHP 7. PHP 7 is almost 2 to 3 times faster than the previous PHP 5.6. It also cuts memory consumption by 50%. This improvement in speed enables developers to build sites that offer interesting as well as engaging interactive features that still respond to user input as quickly as modern web users have come to expect.

Platform Independence

The Zend engine that powers PHP 7 has the potential to implement the just -in -time or JIT execution capabilities which allows the developers to send instructions to the compiler directly on any platform without converting the instructions based on the platform type. This frees the web developers from a huge as well as unnecessary task of converting instructions based on platform types.

Better & easy error handling

Handling fatal errors was never easy for PHP coders. But now the issue has been resolved by PHP 7 which has introduced a new feature that enables programmers to replace these errors with exceptions. But if in case the exception is not caught, PHP 7 will also return the same fatal error as that of 5 series.

Support for 64 bit windows systems

Being a prominent member of LAMP stack, PHP is Linux based but it is also possible to run it on Window systems. The previous version which is the 5.X series did not allow 64 bit integer or large file support but PHP 7 introduced consistent 64 bit support allowing support to both native 64 bit integer as well as large files on a 64 bit windows system.

Spaceship operator

The spaceship operator, also known as combined comparison operator, is another cool & interesting feature of PHP 7. This feature is used to quickly as well as conveniently compare 2 expressions.

a <=> b

• If a is less than b, this expression outputs -1
• If a is equal to b, this expression outputs 0
• If a is greater than b, this expression outputs 1

Abstract Syntax Trees

PHP 7 uses an additional Abstract Syntax Trees or AST step during compilation which gives a performance boost as well as much nicer architecture.

When almost everybody is upgrading to PHP 7, then why should you be left behind?

PHP 7 has a vast number of new, exciting features. It also offers fast performance for websites. Hence it is a wise idea to upgrade to PHP 7 if you want to keep your site running smoothly.