Are you still on PHP 5.6-which will be EOL'd at the end of this year?! PHP 7 was released at the very end of 2015 and brought with it long awaited features to the PHP programming language while striving to keep backwards-compatibility. In this talk, I'll cover the new features including Static Type Hints, new operators, array de-referencing that you can use in your own Drupal modules to make your life easier. I'll also introduce a tool to assess how ready an existing PHP 5 codebase is to migrate to PHP 7.

1. START USING PHP 7.X
Oscar Merida, @omerida
August 1, 2017

2. HELLO
Slides: http://phpa.me/oam-use-php7

3. PHP 5.6 IS EOL
PHP 5 released July 2004
php 5.6: security xes through Dec. 31, 2018
Active support for 5.6 ended Jan 19, 2017. It’s worth noting the last signigicant version of PHP 5 was released Aug. 2014,
almost 3 years ago.
If you have an older applicaiton or clients with one, use a proactive approach. Don’t wait until something bad happens and then
blame them for not upgrading.

4. VULNERABILITIES IN PHP
lists 555 vulnerabilities for PHP.cvedetails.com
This does not mean PHP 7 is vulnerability free or that PHP 5 is riddled with them. It just means the PHP core team is not fixing
vulnerabilities in versions prior to 5.6. After this year, they will only fix PHP 7. You’re distributions may back-port fixes to older
versions, so you may have more time.

5. PHP 7 USES LESS MEMORY
A signi cant amount of work went into optimizing how the
Zend Engine manages memory.
Packed and Immutable Arrays consume less memory.
Reduced memory allocations for variables.
Smarter reference handling.
The Zend Engine is the name given to the PHP interpreter by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutman shipped with PHP 4. Packed
arrays are arrays with numeric indexes, in order. Immutable arrays contain values which don’t change like integers, strings,
other immutable arrays.

6. AS A RESULT, IT USES LESS CPU
Performs fewer memory operations
Optimize how variables in strings are interpolated
The black re.io blog has a series detailing the changes in the
Zend Engine.

7. PHP 7 IS LESS RESOURCE INTENSIVE
Less memory, CPU means == Need Fewer, less powerful
servers.

8. As we’ll see, this can be a powerful argument to your boss or CFO in making a case for upgrading.
BENCHMARKS
for PHP 7:Zend benchmarks
Drupal 7: 316 vs 182 req/sec
Drupal 8: 55 vs 32
From by Rasmus LerdorfSpeeding up the Web with PHP 7
Drupal 8: 2,580 reqs/s vs. 1,401
WordPress: 604 vs 270
Zend, the company started by Zeev and Andi, provided an infographic showing the improvements they measured.
Also, Rasmus Lerdorf, the original creator of PHP, has a talk detailing and measuring the performance improvements.

9. IN PRODUCTION: BADOO
switching to PHP 7 saved $1M.Baddoo.com estimates
Badoo is a social discovery network. Visit this link for real-world data. In summary, they reduced response time by 40%, overall
load on their clusters fell below 50%, and memory usage reduced to 1/8th.
Allows them to save costs by eliminating need for 400 servers, half of their machines.

10. IN PRODUCTION: DAILY MOTION
We can handle twice more traf c, with the same
infrastructure.
PHP 7 deployment at Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a video sharing cite. They used etsy/phan to identify incompatibilities. According to them, it took less than a week

11. to migrate their codebase.
NEW LANGUAGE FEATURES

12. SCALAR TYPE HINTS
function getRecord(int $id) {
// use integer $id to lookup item from DB
}
function concatNames(string $first, string $last) {
return $first . ' ' . $last;
}
PHP 5 had typehints for arrays, callables, classes, and interface. PHP 7 adds it for scalar values. Remove boilerplate code to
check if parameters are valid.

13. SCALAR TYPE HINT:
Enable strict mode to enforce them.
<?php
declare(strict_types = 1);
// ...
// if $id isn't a string, throws an error
$record = $db->getRecord($id);
php.net: Strict Typing
Emphasize the calling code has to enable it. In strict mode, throws exceptions if types don’t match. Otherwise, the Zend Engine
will convert it automatically for you. As a result, int, bool, string, float are now reserved words. You can’t have classes or
functions with the same name.

14. COERCING VALUES
If not in strict mode, PHP tries to convert a variable to the
de ned type.
Type declaration int oat string bool object
int yes yes* yes† yes no
oat yes yes yes† yes no
string yes yes yes yes yes‡
bool yes yes yes yes no

15. RETURN TYPE HINTS
function getRecord(int $id) : PersonRecord {
// use integer $id to lookup item from DB
}
function concatNames(string $first, string $last) : string {
return $first . ' ' . $last;
}
As with type hinting, in strict mode will throw errors. For static types, they’ll be coerced into the correct type. For example,
integers will be turned to strings, etc.

16. ENGINE EXCEPTIONS
Almost all errors are now catchable exceptions.
It’s now possible to catch almost all errors PHP may encounter and handle them gracefully.

17. NEW OPERATORS
1. Spaceship operator <=>
$a <=> $b
2. Null coallesce operator ??
$name = $user['name'] ?? 'anonymous';
These operators introduce syntactic sugar to make code you write more concise. The spaceship operator compares two values,
returns -1, 0, 1. Useful for custom sorting functions.
The null coallesce operator assigns a default value if the expected one is not set.

18. UNIFORM VARIABLE SYNTAX
$field['name' => 'my_field', 'value' => 'target_id'];
$node->$field['value'];
// $node->{$field['value']}; // PHP 5 $node->target_id;
// {$node->$field}['value']; // PHP 7 error, $field is not a string
PHP 7 is consistent when evaluating variables by interpreting them from left to right. If you have some tricky usages of variables
within variables, use curly braces to explicitly set the order.

19. OTHER CHANGES
PHP 7.1: nullable type and void return types.
function doSomething(?string input): ?string
PHP 7.2: libsodium support
Nullable types and void return allow you to make these optional. No error thrown if they are missing.
Libsodium adds modern cryptography support into core. Aim is to provide high quality crypto functions.

20. REMOVED FUNCTIONALITY
PHP 7 did remove features marked as deprecated in PHP 5.
Hence the version bump. PHP RFC: Removed deprecated
functionality
Leading up to PHP 7’s release, an RFC lists all the functionality to be removed. These were already things marked as

21. deprecated in PHP 5.
MYSQL
Old mysql_ family of functions removed
Update code to use PDO and prepared statements
mysqli extension is also an option
This change won’t affect Drupal but if you have custom databases, it’s time to modernize your code.

22. ALSO REMOVED
ASP and Script tags <% and
<script language="php">
ereg_ regular expressions. Use preg_ functions
magic_quotes functionality
Some iconv.* and mbstring.* php.ini settings
preg_replace() eval modi er

23. Many more things were removed in PHP 7 to prevent errors, enhance security, or remove seldom-used features.
NEW DEPRECATED
Develop with E_DEPRECATED and E_NOTICES on to see
and x these errors.
Includes:
PHP 4 style constructors.
Static calls to non-static methods.
ext/mcrypt extension.
See Deprecated features in PHP 7.0
Marking some things for removal in PHP 8.

24. PREPARATION

25. TEST YOUR SITE
Identify code which needs to be updated.
Ideally, have a test suite to check for failures.
If you don’t already have a test suite, this would be a good time in investing in one (cover critical paths)

26. READ THE MIGRATION GUIDE
php.net has a guide forMigrating from PHP 5.6.x to PHP 7.0.x
Lists BC changes
Lists Changed and new functions.
Removed Extensions and SAPIs
I’ve given you an overview of the major features and changes in PHP 7.0. This guide is the canonical reference listing all of
them. You should read it before you update your own applicaitons.

27. DRUPAL CORE
Drupal 8: Core is PHP 7 compatible
Drupal 7: Support PHP 7
Drupal 8 is fully tested and compatible with PHP 7. In fact, Drupal 8 was an important test bed for for candidate releases of PHP
7.
While there are tickets open for D7, ensure you’re using at least 7.50.

28. DRUPAL MODULES
Update contrib modules to include PHP 7 support.
Webform
Backup & Migrate
As usual, PHP 7 support in contrib is harder to guarantee. Becuase of the efforts to maintain BC, most modules should work
with little or no changes. Many might throw new deprecation notices (php4 style constructors where the class name matches a
function name)

29. STATIC ANALYZERS
Automatically scan your codebase and nd code which needs
to be upgraded
: tests for PHP7/PHP5 backward compatibility
(and more)
: has compatibility tests too.
: From 5.3+
etsy/phan
exakat
Preparing Legacy Applications for PHP 7 with Phan
monque/PHP-Migration
These tools will automatically inspect your codebase to look for backwards incompatibility breaks. You’ll need to install the php-
ast extenstion for etsy/phan. Exakat depends on gremlin, neo4 packages.

30. PRE-BUILT ENVIRONMENTS
: PHP 7.1.
Drupal focused, PHP 7.1
for PHP 7.0, 7.1, 7.2
Homestead
DrupalVM
Docker images
Laravel’s Homestead gives you an easy-to-configure LAMP environment. DrupalVM provides a lot, useful if you have many
dependent services like Solr. You can configure it to use PHP 5.6, 7.0, or 7.1. Docker provides official PHP 7 images, more
performant than Vagrant.

31. DISTROS WITH PHP7
Debian stable has PHP 7.0, use for older releases.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has PHP 7.0
Redhat EL: Via Software Collections or 3rd part repos.
Centos 7: from Remi, Webtatic, and
IUS
dotdeb
Precompiled packages

32. CONCLUSION

33. PHP 7…
…brings massive performance gains and improvements to the
language to help you write better code. There’s no reason to
stay on PHP 5.

34. THANK YOU
@omerida
I publish php[architect], a monthly magazine for PHP
developers. Check it out: www.phparch.com
php[world] is our fall conference in Tyson’s Corner.
world.phparch.com