If you've heard about the release of PHP 7 but aren't quite sure what it has to offer, check out this quick post on the StartTutorial site giving you a "top five" list of things this new version of the language has to offer.

But you must be wondering why PHP named its latest release PHP 7 and not PHP 6. Reason behind it is that, many of the PHP 6 releases were already implemented in PHP 5.3 and later, there was not really a proper reason just to change the name. What I am trying to say here is that we haven’t missed anything. Just to avoid the confusion with a dead project, PHP's latest release was named to PHP 7.

Is This Hype Valid for PHP 7? What It Actually Brings Forth for the Developers? Hop on and let’s take a deeper dive. Let's check out what new features PHP 7 has to offer. And what improvements those features will bring forth.

Their top five list covers some of the major improvements in the language:

• Speed Improvement
• Implementation of Type Declarations
• Implementation of Error Handling
• New Operators
• CSPRNG Functions

There's a bit of explanation of each item on the list but you'll definitely want to refer to the PHP manual for more details and specifics on what changed in PHP 7.