For seven consecutive years PHP has been the fourth most popular programming language around the world, where PHP has fed more than 200 million websites, and where the 81,7 percent of public websites host PHP on their server.
PHP has taken a huge leap into the future this week with the first major update since 2004 when version 5.0 was released. PHP 7 greatly improves performance with three times better performance than PHP 5.6, when running on the WordPress CMS in some benchmarks. Next we leave you the image where this great improvement is observed.
It also has other minor changes, such as the use significantly reduced memory usage, return type declarations, special operators and much more. PHP 7 contains a number of last minute changes, such as the removal of PHP safe mode, "Magic quotes", A series of new reserved keywords and other changes.
That means that web applications (CMS) like WordPress needed to be partially redesigned in order to be ready for a future release with PHP 7, although it seems that it is now fully upgrade compatible.
While PHP 7 is now available, it is likely that a few years will pass before it will be widely adopted online. Web applications, especially business applications, tend to take years to update to new versions as a new update comes out.
What many web developers hope is that performance improvements are considerable, and that this will help tempt to update much earlier, both WordPress itself, and the themes or themes that we use.