The Last weekend in Miami, Florida, it took place the SunshinePHP conference where a lot of great members of the PHP community have gave great talks. I did not have the chance to be there, but I followed the talks through the social networks :D!
Rasmus Lerdorf (the PHP creator) was talking about PHP7, and here you can find his slides:
http://talks.php.net/sunshinephp15#
Some of the most important notes:
- Engine improvements:
- 100%+ performance gain on most real-world applications.
- Lower memory usage.
- Native thread local storage.
- Removal of many deprecated features (Your PHP4 code will break!).
- First Release Candidate scheduled for June 2015.
Also, in the slides there are a couple of chart that show you how much the engine is improved, sometimes more than HHVM. And, Rasmus encourages us to test this new PHP7 version and contribute.