PHP 7.0.0 has been released

It's official. PHP 7.0.0 is here. The most important changes are:

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Significantly reduced memory usage
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Improved Exception hierarchy
• Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
• Secure random number generator
• Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Return and Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• Zero cost asserts

The link for the official news item is at http://php.net/archive/2015.php#id2015-12-03-1

To use it in your favorite web development environment, if you're a Linux user (like me), you will have to wait until a package is available for your distribution. If you're on a rolling release (Gentoo forever!), version 7.0.0 is probably a couple of hours away from commit in the portage tree. If you're on Windows (no comment...), grab your binary build from the official Windows releases page, at http://windows.php.net/download/

Exciting days ahead!