With the release of PHP7 I personally feel the need for a historical review and collation

First look at the well-known development history:

hp  inherited from an old project, called  php/fi. php/fi  was created in  1995  by  Rasmus Lerdorf , initially a simple set of  Perl  scripts to track the information of people who visited his page. It named this set of scripts "Personal home page tools". As more functional requirements increase,rasmus  writes a larger  C  language implementation, which can access the database, allowing users to develop simple dynamic  Web  programs. rasmus  released the source code for  PHP/FI  so everyone can use it, and you can fix it  Bug  and improve its source code. PHP/FI, a program specifically designed for your profile/form, already contains some of the basic features of  PHP  today. It has  Perl -style variables, automatically interprets form variables, and can be embedded in  html. The grammar itself is similar to  Perl , but it is very limited, simple and somewhat uncoordinated. By 1997, php/fi 2.0, the second edition of its  C  language implementation, has thousands of users (estimates) and approximately  50,000  domain names installed around the world, about  internet    1% of all domain names. But then only a few people were writing a small amount of code for the project, and it was still just a human project. php/fi 2.0  has released its official version of the  1997  year  11  month after several  beta  releases. Soon,php 3.0  's first  alpha  release,php  to success. php 3php 3.0  is the first version similar to today's  PHP  syntax structure. andi gutmans  and  Zeev Suraski  found the  PHP/FI 2.0  work when developing e-commerce programs for a university projectCan be significantly inadequate, so they rewrite the code. This is  php 3.0. After andi,rasmus  and  Zeev  a series of efforts, taking into account the  PHP/FI  existing user base, they decided to jointly publish  PHP 3.0  as Official successor to  PHP/FI 2.0 . The further development of the  PHP/FI 2.0  nearly terminated. One of the most powerful features of php 3.0  is its. In addition to providing the infrastructure for the end user with databases, protocols, and  API , it also attracts a large number of developers to join and submit new modules. It was later confirmed that this was the key to  PHP 3.0  's great success. Other key features in php 3.0  include support and a more powerful and coordinated syntax structure. This new language accompanies a new name release. It removes from the name of  PHP/FI 2.0  the section that implies "this language is limited to personal use". It is named the simple abbreviation "PHP". This is a recursive abbreviation, and its full name is--php: hypertext preprocessor. The number of,php  installed at the end of 1998  is near  10,000, with about  100,000  websites reporting that they used  php. It is installed on the  PHP 3.0  peak,internet   10%   Web  server. After about nine months, the official release of  php 3.0 in June 1998. php 41998  Winter,php 3.0  official release soon,andi gutmans  and  Zeev Suraski  began to rewrite  PHP  code. The design goal is to enhance the performance of the complex program runtime and the modularity of the  PHP  itself code. php 3.0  's new capabilities and extensive third-party database and API support make it possible to write such programs, but  PHP 3.0  is not efficientThe ability to handle such complex procedures. The new engine, known as the "Zend engine" (which is the abbreviation for  Zeev  and  Andi ), successfully achieved design goals and was first introduced in  1999  mid-year   Php. The  php 4.0, which was based on the engine and combined with more new features, was released in May 2000, two years after the  PHP 3.0  release. In addition to higher performance,,php 4.0  also includes some other key features, such as: support for more  Web  servers; http sessions  support, output caching (output buffering), more secure methods for handling user input, and some new language constructs. php 4  is the latest version of the current  PHP . The work to modify and enhance  Zend Engine  to make  PHP 5.0  integrate new features has started. Today, there are  10,000  developers (estimates) and millions of website reports have installed  php, accounting for the entire  Internet  domain name  20%. php  Development team has a lot of good developers, but also a large number of outstanding people in the  PHP  related engineering development work, such as  PEAR  and  PHP  document engineering. The future of php 5php  is mainly controlled by its core,zend engine . php 5  will contain a new generation of  zend engine 2.0. Please visit their website for more information about the engine.

With the release of PHP7 I personally feel the need for a historical review and collation