PHP 7.3 Brings C Inlining and Speed Improvements

An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic:
PHP 7.3, the newest update to the widespread server-side web development language, was released on Thursday, bringing with it a handful of new features, modernizations, and modest speed improvements.... The largest improvements in 7.3 include support for Foreign Function Interface (FFI), allowing programmers to write inline C code inside PHP scripts. Though this feature does not presently provide the same level of performance as native PHP code, it can under certain circumstances be used to reduce the memory footprint of a given task.

PHP 7.3 also includes flexible heredoc and nowdoc syntax, now no longer requiring closing markers to be followed by a semicolon or new line. The feature proposal for this notes that the previous rigid requirements 'caused them to be, in-part, eschewed by developers because their usage in code can look ugly and harm readability....' PHP 7.3 does bring some backward incompatible changes and deprecated functions. The use of case-insensitive constraints is now deprecated, as is the use of case-insensitive constants with a case that differs from the declaration.
Phoronix reports that PHP 7.3 is nearly 10% faster than version 7.2, while it's 31% faster than PHP 7.0 and nearly three times faster than PHP 5.6.

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