PHP Seven for the world, the 2-billion web site is expected to double the efficiency

PHP 7 for the world, the 2-billion web site is expected to double the efficiency

After 10 years of waiting, PHP 7 is finally officially asked. This affects the opening language of the Global 80% Web site, from the 5.0 version, jumped through the failure of the 6.0 version, one into the 7.0 generation.

20 years ago early summer, June 8, 1995, a C language software engineer who loves to solve a problem, is hard to know how to use C to make a personal home page, because no one provides the C language version of the Web development environment. He simply wrote it himself and named personal Home Page Tools, a simple php Tool. This is the first version of the PHP language used to launch the 2 Conto Web sites, such as Facebook and Yahoo! And this C-language developers Rasmus Lerdorf, also become the father of PHP. PHP has been flying with the Internet since 1996 and has quickly become the first choice for developers to build their web sites.

But, in the fast-growing IT world, the earlier the technology, the more often the heavier the burden of transformation. PHP language and the work system, from the 32-bit structure began to enter the 64-bit, in 2004, the introduction of PHP 5 is a substantial transformation of the version, smoothly into the object to the structure of the world, stable web site development technology Dragon. Even though it's easy to get started with the hog, PHP is still the first choice for many Web site developers to launch technical and offensive markets with ASP Web sites. In 2008, at least 1 of the 4 Web sites in Taiwan were developed with PHP.

But, in 2005, PHP had a heavy fall on the Unicode support process. Unicode support was originally intended to be the main feature of PHP 6, but in the development community for the multi-lingual support of the dispute, and the quality of the PHP issue of the question, derived a long tug of war, also delayed the development of PHP 6, and even PHP 5.3 of the small Revision hog first in 2009 to support PHP 6 of the most features (in addition to Unicode support), the next spring, the PHP 6 was formally defeated and eventually, but also for the development of PHP technology, overshadowed by a haze. PHP 5 continues to revise the new, but it is always a small change in the advantages of minor repairs, and fresh from the fundamental innovation of the big step. Despite the slow pace of language, the impact of PHP is continuous and falling, and even bigger, in early 2013, Netcraft Web site, the world over 2.4 billions web site behind the language used is PHP.

Rasmus Lerdorf told me in a speech this May that Facebook has changed the JIT of the PHP translation engine for the speed of its own web site, causing the PHP developers to rethink the PHP language's effectiveness.

In 2014, a group of PHP developers (including Xinchen from China) opened a PHP language structure, the PHP ng case (php New Generation), to improve performance, they did not hesitate to re-examine or even change the PHP language source code, a test results found that PHP program's performance increased significantly by 30%.

In the old version of PHP, the goal is to offer as much functionality as possible to meet the needs of any Web site, but the new PHP 7 is looking for performance and functionality. Rasmus Lerdorf said so.

But it's not easy to find the key to a great breakthrough in a world that has been developed for more than 10 years and has been meticulously crafted by open-source developers.

As a result, PHP 5 is a great success for PHP Ng, but also for PHP to develop community support, the base of PHP 7, to develop the community to carefully scrutinize each line of PHP code, to find out from various places the key to efficiency.

For example, the PHP core team spent a lot of effort to reduce the number of memory bits that the PHP program needs to move, such as the zval of the PHP storage variable from 24 bits to 16 bits. or re-examine the CPU-level code to make sure PHP 7 code is more compliant with a new generation of processor structures.

The refinement of each modification may only improve performance by less than 0.5%, but after hundreds of such deliberate results, PHP 7 is more efficient than the old version.

While it's not easy to upgrade from PHP 5 to 7, PHP 7 is a new lifesaver for the 2 billions Web sites that have been developed with PHP, which is a solution to the décolleté of existing Web-site performance bottles.

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