Source: PHP.net
15 Oct 2015
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 5. This is the tenth pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.
THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!
PHP 7.0.0 RC 5 contains fixes for 11 reported bugs and over 100 commits with various improvements.
PHP 7.0.0 comes with new version of the Zend Engine with features such as (incomplete list):
Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
Consistent 64-bit support
Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
The null coalescing operator (??)
Combined comparison Operator (<=>)
Return Type Declarations
Scalar Type Declarations
Anonymous Classes
For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the migration guide for a complete list of upgrading notes. NEWS and UPGRADING files can also be found in the release archive.
For source downloads of PHP 7.0.0 RC 5 please visit the download page, Windows source and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/.
The next release will be RC 6, which is to be released on the 29th of October. You can also read the full list of planned releases on our wiki.
