PHP latest version progress: PHP 7.3 is about to enter the feature freezing stage, 22% faster than PHP 7.0

With the release of PHP 7.3 Alpha3 last week, it means that PHP 7.3 is about to enter the feature freezing stage, and no new features will be added. Subsequent beta and rc versions will mainly be repaired until the official version is released on November 29. .

Judging from the current update instructions, PHP 7.3 is not a version focusing on new features, but contains more bug fixes. PHP 7.3 removes support for BeOS, improves PHP GC, and implements more flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax.

PHP 7 was officially released in December 2015. After more than two years of development and iteration, usage has continued to rise, but it still lags behind PHP 5 by a large margin. series. The latest statistics from W3Techs.com are as follows:

The latest version of the PHP 5 series is PHP 5.6, which was released in 2014 and is currently the most widely used version. However, in six months, PHP 5.6 will completely lose official support. By then, it may bring a surge of users to PHP 7.

Everyone knows that when PHP 7 was released, it was claimed to be twice as fast as PHP 5.6. So what is the performance of PHP 7.3? Phoronix conducted a benchmark test when PHP 7.3 Alpha1 was released. It was found that in the commonly used PHPBench benchmark test, PHP 7.3.0 Alpha 1 is about 7% faster than the current PHP 7.2 stable version and 22% faster than PHP 7.0:

PHP 7.3 also performs well when using Phoronix's own test suite. There have been significant improvements in rendering tests and data processing tests.

Which version of PHP are you currently using? Do you have any plans to upgrade? Comments and discussion are welcome.