2015 can be considered as the great leap forward of PHP. It was eleven years of waiting from the release of PHP 5.0, finally new version of PHP also come our way with a lot of new language features as well as an impressive performance boost. This version concentrates mainly on removing functionality that is deprecated in former versions and improving language consistency.

PHP 7 appears as the revolution in the way we deliver applications that power everything, from websites to cloud. Moreover, in spirit aspect, the number 7 in name of PHP also represent the lucky in both Asian and Western culture.

To get the deeper insight, we should see how all the awesome features can use with Magento. Magento is based on its own framework which is based on the Zend Framework making any request using hundreds of PHP files and lines of code. With the long experiences in this sector, developers Ivan Curdinjakovic shares some note about the combination of PHP 7 and Magento.

According his opinions, Magento 1 is not really officially compatible with PHP 7 but it is not too difficult to cover this phenomenon. The ability in performance of PHP 7 is double in comparison to PHP 5.6 thanks to MySQL, OpCache setup, hardware, etc. When you spend some times to evaluate, you will get a healthy appreciation of the kind of upgrade PHP 7 is on any project.

The most outstanding feature of PHP 7 is promoting performance anywhere, even including the worst case scenarios, while other technologies such as cached (Varnish, Redis, etc.) only improve the best case scenario. If you look into it when it works on a completely different level, you can totally combine all of that to get a actually fast Magento 1 store.

Besides performance, Ivan Curdinjakovic also mentions to some other wonderful features of PHP 7. He devotes special excited for improved input type hints, return type declarations, and the null coalesce operator due to their protections from a whole class of bugs, security holes, and making code more self-documenting.

Magento 2 core needs to keep compatibility with PHP 5.5 & 5.6; therefore, some features of PHP 7 cannot be applied but if client’s project is on a PHP 7 server, all these goodies in custom code can be unleashed.

All in all, our long time of waiting will be entirely worthy of special features developers are enjoying working with. You can achieve the new experiences when performance is improved considerably, fatal and catchable errors are handled and accurate type declarations and null coalescing operators.

Source @Inchoo.net