On the Laravel News site, they have a post sharing a video from a presentation by Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) looking forward at PHP in 2018.

PHP in 2018 is a talk by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, which focuses on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3. We have some exciting low-level performance wins coming to PHP 7.3, which should be out late 2018. It’s highly encouraging that PHP’s focus is mainly on performance in the PHP 7.x releases.

For many in the PHP community, 2016 and 2017 was all about getting onto PHP 7. The drastic performance improvements and overall efficiency have resulted in PHP 7 adoption rates well beyond past PHP versions. If you are not on PHP 7 yet, you will learn why you should be, but the talk will focus more on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3 along with optimization and static analysis.

In the post, they give a brief summary of the talk and one of their favorite parts ("crappy code runs really really well"). The video of the talk is embedded in the page but you can also watch it on YouTube directly. The slides are here.