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TL;DR: 1. Scheduled to come out in Q4 2015 2. <=> operator, see https://wiki.php.net/rfc/combined-comparison-operator https://wiki.php.net/rfc/combined-compar

TL;DR: 1. Scheduled to come out in Q4 2015 2. <=> operator, see https://wiki.php.net/rfc/combined-comparison-operator https://wiki.php.net/rfc/combined-comparison-operator 3. Return Type Declarations & Scalar Type Hints 4. Speed improvements (25-70%) 5. Yep, speed improvements are for real. You're welcome.

xrstf 12y ago
> 1. Scheduled to come out in Q4 2015 ... and available on general cheap webhosting sometime around 2020. If we're lucky. Thank god our company slowly moved away from building small PHP websites that have to run on the most fucked up PHP installations from the before-time. Now it's PHP 5.6+ everywhere :-)
- mawburn 12y ago
  >... and available on general cheap webhosting sometime around 2020. If we're lucky. Shared Hosting needs to die off anyway.
  - CatsoCatsoCatso 12y ago
    Why?
    - pestaa 12y ago
      The security implications and unpredictable resource availability never made it feasible to run a real production site from shared hosting.
      - andybak 12y ago
        Hmmmm. I've got about a dozen.
      - stingraycharles 12y ago
        What? You are suggesting that everyone should run their own server? And you are suggesting that nobody even ran a real production site on shared hosting? You could say the exact same thing about VPS servers compared to dedicated hosting and be equally wrong. Please accept that there are different use cases that come with different solutions, of which shared hosting is one.
      - zupreme 12y ago
        Interesting perspective. I have clients who have been making very healthy mid to high six figure incomes off of their commerce sites, blogs, and CPA sites which live on shared hosting. Good thing they didn't get your memo.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        Yes, many shared hosts suck, but so do many VPS hosts. It doesn't mean shared hosting is an unworkable model.
      - teh_klev 12y ago
        It depends on the hoster and how much you're willing to pay. If you're paying $2.99 a month then yes, you're probably going to have a less than predictable experience. I work for a shared/dedicated hoster, we're geared price-wise at the higher end of the market and we provide shared hosting for our business customers. Our shared environments are closely monitored and never oversubscribed. We're constantly looking out for customer sites that misbehave and shut down those that are resource hogs or service affecting. We have loads of customers running the internet facing parts of their businesses on shared. Shared hosting, like all other things, is a case of "you get what you paid for".
  - BuildTheRobots 12y ago
    Shared hosting does mean that your provider is likely keeping their platform patched and up to date, which is possibly painful for you but likely nice for everyone else. The alternatives seem to be giving customers a VM or a dedicated server which tends to mean it's _never_ going to get any security updates since the day it was first set up. Shared hosting is a pain, but the alternatives have the potential for even more pain.
    - batou 12y ago
      As a former herder of dedicated servers purchased for this sort of thing, you'd be surprised how difficult it is telling people they need to pay to upgrade it. We had a client with an old supermicro P3 running red hat 7 (not RHEL) until last year. Genuinely surprised it lasted as long as it did. Edit: it was RH7, not RH5. Just checked. Still bad.
      - BuildTheRobots 12y ago
        I used to work as a DCO in a relatively large DC. It was always slightly terrifying when you'd be asked to investigate a customers unresponsive dedic only to find out it's attempting to boot ubuntu 6 LTS. "Well I don't see why it's broken -it was working absolutely fine and we've not touched it in years!"
  - larzang 12y ago
    Okay, sure, instead your new job is to play security and sysadmin for the DigitalOcean containers for all the small local business Wordpress sites for say $10 an hour. Shared Hosting has many downsides, but it still fills an incredibly important niche for businesses for whom a web presence beyond a Facebook page is needed but real managed hosting is completely out of their price range.
    - batou 12y ago
      A million times this. Also some regularly missed advantages of shared hosting are that its usually available in the same country as you, is portable unlike PaaS solutions, doesn't require lots of legwork and tends to come with a shit ton of bandwidth up front meaning no per-Gb costs which can ramp pretty quickly.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      Lol, I'm in the middle of doing this - moving from shared hosting to a DO droplet. It is painful. Setting up the server isn't so bad but email is a nightmare. Unfortunately the large email providers are moving to block a lot of smaller servers it seems which might make it harder in the future at present using an SPF seems to get mails through. DO of course have a Wordpress appliance which makes it pretty easy to set up, if you can manage Wordpress you can do it, so long as you're not concerned with getting in to the details of security of your droplet. It's probably no less secure than a lot of virtual hosting arrangements with 777 access on content folders and such. [If anyone wants a free $10 credit for DO then feel free to message me.]
      - karlshea 12y ago
        I've been having all my clients sign up for a Mandrill account for sending email since it's so unbelievably cheap (usually free) and it completely fixes the email problem.
        pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        Ah, free for up to 12k emails, or something close - looking at this now. Thanks for the tip. One thing I have noticed is their terms preclude the sending of material under Fair Use terms of copyright law ... but I'm assuming that is a mistake. >"You represent and warrant that you either own or have permission to use all of the material in your Emails." // Fair use isn't permission, nor ownership, it is statutory right of use though. They bring in Spamhaus' definition of spam too, which on first reading appears to be self-contradictory - requiring each message sent to be explicitly requested. Taken by the letter this would mean I couldn't, for example, send out a message to a group of customers with whom I had a standing relationship to let them know of a change to terms & conditions, for example, without explicit consent. That means anticipating every email. Catchall phrases like "agree to receive all email" wouldn't work as the customer "has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent". Indeed "still-revocable" permission means that as soon as a mass email is sent it becomes spam regardless, it's no longer revocable. There are other problems too - verifiable opt in means an alternate system needs to be used for the verification emails. In turn that means that any email I send to multiple recipients puts me in breech of Mandrill's T&Cs. Mandrill have a circular reference from the Terms "You retain ownership of the materials you upload to the Service. We may use or disclose your materials only as we describe in these Terms and our Privacy Policy." and in the Privacy Policy: >"Information You Provide to Us: When you register to use the Services, communicate with our customer service team, send us an email, or post on our blog, you’re giving us information that we collect. That information may include your IP address, name, physical address, email address, phone number, credit card information, and other details like gender, occupation, and other demographic information. By giving us this information, you consent to your information being collected, used, disclosed, and stored by us, only as described in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy." In short the policies allow them to harvest data from emails sent with the service and to use it as they wish. They go as far as to intimate that because they do use the message data internally that the service is not for personal email. There's also a clause Terms 5.f that allows doxing and combining the info with your account data. The "protections" for selling of your info with the business don't work as there are standard "we can alter this agreement unilaterally" conditions. tl;dr law - it's complicated. This service is absolutely not for "personal" emails however.
  - ebbv 12y ago
    This is a ridiculous statement. For many small businesses Shared Hosting makes a lot more sense than a VPS. And for small personal sites as well. This is like saying "Bicycles need to die out." just because you never ride one. Disclaimer: I work for a web hosting company.
  - JeremyMorgan 12y ago
    No it doesn't. If you're a small company paying for shared hosting at < $20 per month is a far better alternative than hiring an admin to run DO instances or whatever. If you have a full time developer who happens to know how to administer servers well it's fine, but many companies barely even even have a full time developer. For them shared hosting makes perfect sense.
  - UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
    I'd argue it just needs to evolve and improve. For example Azure's Web Sites and to a lesser extent Amazon's S3 do a great job for what they both are, and they're both "shared hosting."
raphaelj 12y ago
So 1 is not a feature, 4 & 5 are the same thing (and maybe a consequence of 3) while 2 can be remplaced by a single function. Seems like the only new feature are type hints. Looks like Hack has been rebranded as PHP 7.
- pestaa 12y ago
  Well, the biggest issue with PHP in my opinion was the interpreter. Let's cut the cost of function calls by 90%, and PHP would be back in the game of performant languages.
- wnevets 12y ago
  PHP7 is really just about the speed boost.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Actually, scalar type hint support makes PHP 7 marginally slower (more branches), though it could be used for future optimisations. The speed boost is due to massive engine changes and internal refactoring.
- wvenable 12y ago
  There are tons of new features, this list is pretty pathetic. I'm not sure why the spaceship operator got top billing when there has been so many other great changes.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Because it has a cool name.
zachberger 12y ago
Thank you. This website is completely useless on mobile.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  It's also completely blank without javascript.
  - darrelld 12y ago
    Why are you not running javascript? Is it a environment restriction, out of security concern or personal preference? Since tone can be tricky on the internet I'll just add that I am genuinely curious about this.
    - theg2 12y ago
      Last time it came up on Hacker News, it's because a large amount of people apparently believe that all sites should run without Javascript. I was told that as a web developer that I should "stop trying". It tends to be a classic case of blaming the tools for the actions of the people using them.
    - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      I was only doing so momentarily as a part of debugging the mobile issue. I'm fully aware that most people (intend to) run javascript most of the time, but I also think it's preferable that content doesn't introduce an unnecessary dependency on javascript. I haven't investigated this case in enough depth to determine if it's necessary or not, but the end result leads me to believe it shouldn't be.
    - kowdermeister 12y ago
      Sometimes it's not intentional JS blocking. I run adblock and ghostery and by blocking 3rd party scripts some crucial part of a site just break also. For example, people track link clicks in a web app and they do it with Google analytics. If not handled correctly, it will break all the navigation on a page.
- 12y ago
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
> 1. Scheduled to come out in Q4 2015 Which won't happen, I can tell you. PHP's release dates always slip by at least a month, and that's without a very unstable master branch like PHP 7 has. If it does happen, it'll take a few micro (7.0.x) releases until it reaches stability. > 3. Return Type Declarations & Scalar Type Hints Also strict scalar typing: <?php declare(strict_types=1); sin(false); // error strlen(2); // error However, Zend not mentioning this is to be expected. The company's founders (Zeev Suraski, Andi Gutmans) and employees (Dmitry Stogov and some others) are some of the biggest opponents of strict typing in PHP. -- disclaimer: I am a former PHP internals developer
- awalGarg 12y ago
  > biggest opponents of strict typing in PHP Umm, well I saw Zeev has voted in favor of scalar type hints on the RFC?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    He did vote in favour of the RFC. However, this was reluctantly, at the last minute, and under pressure. He is very much opposed to strict types, but he felt this was the only way scalar types would get into 7.

xrstf 12y ago

> 1. Scheduled to come out in Q4 2015 ... and available on general cheap webhosting sometime around 2020. If we're lucky. Thank god our company slowly moved away from building small PHP websites that have to run on the most fucked up PHP installations from the before-time. Now it's PHP 5.6+ everywhere :-)

mawburn 12y ago
>... and available on general cheap webhosting sometime around 2020. If we're lucky. Shared Hosting needs to die off anyway.
- CatsoCatsoCatso 12y ago
  Why?
  - pestaa 12y ago
    The security implications and unpredictable resource availability never made it feasible to run a real production site from shared hosting.
    - andybak 12y ago
      Hmmmm. I've got about a dozen.
    - stingraycharles 12y ago
      What? You are suggesting that everyone should run their own server? And you are suggesting that nobody even ran a real production site on shared hosting? You could say the exact same thing about VPS servers compared to dedicated hosting and be equally wrong. Please accept that there are different use cases that come with different solutions, of which shared hosting is one.
    - zupreme 12y ago
      Interesting perspective. I have clients who have been making very healthy mid to high six figure incomes off of their commerce sites, blogs, and CPA sites which live on shared hosting. Good thing they didn't get your memo.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      Yes, many shared hosts suck, but so do many VPS hosts. It doesn't mean shared hosting is an unworkable model.
    - teh_klev 12y ago
      It depends on the hoster and how much you're willing to pay. If you're paying $2.99 a month then yes, you're probably going to have a less than predictable experience. I work for a shared/dedicated hoster, we're geared price-wise at the higher end of the market and we provide shared hosting for our business customers. Our shared environments are closely monitored and never oversubscribed. We're constantly looking out for customer sites that misbehave and shut down those that are resource hogs or service affecting. We have loads of customers running the internet facing parts of their businesses on shared. Shared hosting, like all other things, is a case of "you get what you paid for".
- BuildTheRobots 12y ago
  Shared hosting does mean that your provider is likely keeping their platform patched and up to date, which is possibly painful for you but likely nice for everyone else. The alternatives seem to be giving customers a VM or a dedicated server which tends to mean it's _never_ going to get any security updates since the day it was first set up. Shared hosting is a pain, but the alternatives have the potential for even more pain.
  - batou 12y ago
    As a former herder of dedicated servers purchased for this sort of thing, you'd be surprised how difficult it is telling people they need to pay to upgrade it. We had a client with an old supermicro P3 running red hat 7 (not RHEL) until last year. Genuinely surprised it lasted as long as it did. Edit: it was RH7, not RH5. Just checked. Still bad.
    - BuildTheRobots 12y ago
      I used to work as a DCO in a relatively large DC. It was always slightly terrifying when you'd be asked to investigate a customers unresponsive dedic only to find out it's attempting to boot ubuntu 6 LTS. "Well I don't see why it's broken -it was working absolutely fine and we've not touched it in years!"
- larzang 12y ago
  Okay, sure, instead your new job is to play security and sysadmin for the DigitalOcean containers for all the small local business Wordpress sites for say $10 an hour. Shared Hosting has many downsides, but it still fills an incredibly important niche for businesses for whom a web presence beyond a Facebook page is needed but real managed hosting is completely out of their price range.
  - batou 12y ago
    A million times this. Also some regularly missed advantages of shared hosting are that its usually available in the same country as you, is portable unlike PaaS solutions, doesn't require lots of legwork and tends to come with a shit ton of bandwidth up front meaning no per-Gb costs which can ramp pretty quickly.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Lol, I'm in the middle of doing this - moving from shared hosting to a DO droplet. It is painful. Setting up the server isn't so bad but email is a nightmare. Unfortunately the large email providers are moving to block a lot of smaller servers it seems which might make it harder in the future at present using an SPF seems to get mails through. DO of course have a Wordpress appliance which makes it pretty easy to set up, if you can manage Wordpress you can do it, so long as you're not concerned with getting in to the details of security of your droplet. It's probably no less secure than a lot of virtual hosting arrangements with 777 access on content folders and such. [If anyone wants a free $10 credit for DO then feel free to message me.]
    - karlshea 12y ago
      I've been having all my clients sign up for a Mandrill account for sending email since it's so unbelievably cheap (usually free) and it completely fixes the email problem.
      - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        Ah, free for up to 12k emails, or something close - looking at this now. Thanks for the tip. One thing I have noticed is their terms preclude the sending of material under Fair Use terms of copyright law ... but I'm assuming that is a mistake. >"You represent and warrant that you either own or have permission to use all of the material in your Emails." // Fair use isn't permission, nor ownership, it is statutory right of use though. They bring in Spamhaus' definition of spam too, which on first reading appears to be self-contradictory - requiring each message sent to be explicitly requested. Taken by the letter this would mean I couldn't, for example, send out a message to a group of customers with whom I had a standing relationship to let them know of a change to terms & conditions, for example, without explicit consent. That means anticipating every email. Catchall phrases like "agree to receive all email" wouldn't work as the customer "has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent". Indeed "still-revocable" permission means that as soon as a mass email is sent it becomes spam regardless, it's no longer revocable. There are other problems too - verifiable opt in means an alternate system needs to be used for the verification emails. In turn that means that any email I send to multiple recipients puts me in breech of Mandrill's T&Cs. Mandrill have a circular reference from the Terms "You retain ownership of the materials you upload to the Service. We may use or disclose your materials only as we describe in these Terms and our Privacy Policy." and in the Privacy Policy: >"Information You Provide to Us: When you register to use the Services, communicate with our customer service team, send us an email, or post on our blog, you’re giving us information that we collect. That information may include your IP address, name, physical address, email address, phone number, credit card information, and other details like gender, occupation, and other demographic information. By giving us this information, you consent to your information being collected, used, disclosed, and stored by us, only as described in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy." In short the policies allow them to harvest data from emails sent with the service and to use it as they wish. They go as far as to intimate that because they do use the message data internally that the service is not for personal email. There's also a clause Terms 5.f that allows doxing and combining the info with your account data. The "protections" for selling of your info with the business don't work as there are standard "we can alter this agreement unilaterally" conditions. tl;dr law - it's complicated. This service is absolutely not for "personal" emails however.
- ebbv 12y ago
  This is a ridiculous statement. For many small businesses Shared Hosting makes a lot more sense than a VPS. And for small personal sites as well. This is like saying "Bicycles need to die out." just because you never ride one. Disclaimer: I work for a web hosting company.
- JeremyMorgan 12y ago
  No it doesn't. If you're a small company paying for shared hosting at < $20 per month is a far better alternative than hiring an admin to run DO instances or whatever. If you have a full time developer who happens to know how to administer servers well it's fine, but many companies barely even even have a full time developer. For them shared hosting makes perfect sense.
- UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
  I'd argue it just needs to evolve and improve. For example Azure's Web Sites and to a lesser extent Amazon's S3 do a great job for what they both are, and they're both "shared hosting."

raphaelj 12y ago

So 1 is not a feature, 4 & 5 are the same thing (and maybe a consequence of 3) while 2 can be remplaced by a single function. Seems like the only new feature are type hints. Looks like Hack has been rebranded as PHP 7.

pestaa 12y ago
Well, the biggest issue with PHP in my opinion was the interpreter. Let's cut the cost of function calls by 90%, and PHP would be back in the game of performant languages.
wnevets 12y ago
PHP7 is really just about the speed boost.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Actually, scalar type hint support makes PHP 7 marginally slower (more branches), though it could be used for future optimisations. The speed boost is due to massive engine changes and internal refactoring.
wvenable 12y ago
There are tons of new features, this list is pretty pathetic. I'm not sure why the spaceship operator got top billing when there has been so many other great changes.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Because it has a cool name.

zachberger 12y ago

Thank you. This website is completely useless on mobile.

oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
It's also completely blank without javascript.
- darrelld 12y ago
  Why are you not running javascript? Is it a environment restriction, out of security concern or personal preference? Since tone can be tricky on the internet I'll just add that I am genuinely curious about this.
  - theg2 12y ago
    Last time it came up on Hacker News, it's because a large amount of people apparently believe that all sites should run without Javascript. I was told that as a web developer that I should "stop trying". It tends to be a classic case of blaming the tools for the actions of the people using them.
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    I was only doing so momentarily as a part of debugging the mobile issue. I'm fully aware that most people (intend to) run javascript most of the time, but I also think it's preferable that content doesn't introduce an unnecessary dependency on javascript. I haven't investigated this case in enough depth to determine if it's necessary or not, but the end result leads me to believe it shouldn't be.
  - kowdermeister 12y ago
    Sometimes it's not intentional JS blocking. I run adblock and ghostery and by blocking 3rd party scripts some crucial part of a site just break also. For example, people track link clicks in a web app and they do it with Google analytics. If not handled correctly, it will break all the navigation on a page.
12y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

> 1. Scheduled to come out in Q4 2015 Which won't happen, I can tell you. PHP's release dates always slip by at least a month, and that's without a very unstable master branch like PHP 7 has. If it does happen, it'll take a few micro (7.0.x) releases until it reaches stability. > 3. Return Type Declarations & Scalar Type Hints Also strict scalar typing: <?php declare(strict_types=1); sin(false); // error strlen(2); // error However, Zend not mentioning this is to be expected. The company's founders (Zeev Suraski, Andi Gutmans) and employees (Dmitry Stogov and some others) are some of the biggest opponents of strict typing in PHP. -- disclaimer: I am a former PHP internals developer

awalGarg 12y ago
> biggest opponents of strict typing in PHP Umm, well I saw Zeev has voted in favor of scalar type hints on the RFC?
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  He did vote in favour of the RFC. However, this was reluctantly, at the last minute, and under pressure. He is very much opposed to strict types, but he felt this was the only way scalar types would get into 7.