In the /r/php subreddit on the Reddit.com site there's a new post that links over to this infographic from Zend sharing some of their own benchmark results for PHP 7 (and comparing it to other versions).

We ran performance benchmarks on popular PHP apps to compare PHP 5.6, PHP 7, and HHVM 3.7.

Their benchmarks includes results for:

• Magento (1.9)
• Drupal
• WordPress
• Laravel and Zend Framework
• SugarCRM

They also compare PHP 7 against other languages, showing the execution in seconds when generating a Mandelbrot fractal.

There's been a lot of talk in the community about PHP 7 and what features will be included but there's been a *lot* of it. To help distill it down a bit Zend has posted this infographic of the Top 5 features that will be coming in this next major version.

Their top five list includes both the main points and a quick summary for:

• When it comes out (hint: this year)
• The spaceship operator
• Return type declarations and scalar type hints
• Performance improvements

...and #5, even more performance improvements. There's also some links to other information about some of the topics to provide even more detail for those wanting to dive in.

If you've never heard of the powerful tool and you need automation around creating and configuring multiple virtual machines, you really should check it out. If you're curious as to how it's being used and what kind of things it's used for, check out this new post from Erika Heidi based on some research she recently did (and a survey she received some good feedback to).

From 11 to 14 of January, 720 Vagrant users from different sources (Twitter, IRC and the official Vagrant mailing list) answered a quick form I created to find out how people are using Vagrant. I’m currently in the process of writing a LeanPub book about this tool, and I was really curious especially about the provisioners usage.

She's put together the results in the form of an easy to read infographic with details about:

• The most popular provisioners
• The percentage of boxes running with OS
• The percentage of languages on the boxes
• The OS most Vagrant users use

...and finally the answer(s) to the question of "why vagrant?" but I'll leave it to you to read the post to find out that one.

On the ZFort Group's site today there's a new post sharing an infrographic about frameworks in PHP. The data was gathered from Google Trends and looks at popularity and provides some detail for each.

There is a great deal of frameworks, PHP ones in particular, fighting for developers attention. Zfort Group is an interested party in terms of choosing the best PHP frameworks for our custom PHP projects and internal ones as well. So we are continually investigating trends, developers' voting, forums, reviews, ratings, etc. We collected unique and very interesting information and it could be really helpful to the PHP community.

They pulled in some data from other sources as well. It's interesting to see which of the options came out highest in the numbers. They looked at trends for Yii, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony. They detail some of the features of each framework including the required PHP version, complexity and quality of community/documentation.

On the Udemy blog there's a new post with a large infographic showing "who reigns supreme" comparing Ruby, Python and PHP (don't worry, this isn't flamebait...it's actual good stats comparing the state of these three languages).

Just as the Japanese, Spanish and French languages are uniquely different, programming languages also have their variations, some more popular and easier to use than others. With the recent introduction of some new ones, there is a 'war' of modern day languages. What's easier and faster to use is not always the best option.

The graphic includes stats like:

• Usability ratings
• Popularity in the TIOBE index
• How much it's discussed (from the IEEE Spectrum, IRC)
• The number of open job postings
• Average run time/lines of code

Check out the full post for more interesting data.