Davey Shafik has posted the first part of a new series about PHP 7 on the Engine Yard blog today - What to Expect When You're Expecting: PHP 7.

As many of you are probably aware, the RFC I mentioned in my PHP 5.0.0 timeline passed with PHP 7 being the agreed upon name for the next major version of PHP. Regardless of your feelings on this topic, PHP 7 is a thing, and it's coming this year! With the RFC for the PHP 7.0 Timeline passing almost unanimously (32 to 2), we have now entered into feature freeze, and we'll see the first release candidate (RC) appearing in mid June. But what does this mean for you?

He gets into some of the details of what you can expect to see in this next major release including:

• Inconsistency Fixes
• Performance
• Backwards Incompatible Changes
• Scalar Type Hints & Return Types
• Combined Comparison Operator (spaceship)

He ends the post hinting at other things to come in part two of the series including six other big features you need to know about to upgrade to PHP 7.