The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 Beta 1. This is the third pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.
THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!

Beta 1 marks the feature complete phase. From now on, fundamental changes are not to be expected. What's more, this release brings over 200 commits with about 25 reported bug fixes, as well as security, stability and other improvements. However it was delayed to catch up with the latest OpenSSL release issued on July 9th.

PHP 7.0.0 comes with new version of the Zend Engine with features such as (incomplete list):

Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
Consistent 64-bit support
Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
The null coalescing operator (??)
Combined comparison Operator ()
Return Type Declarations
Scalar Type Declarations
Anonymous Classes

For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.

For source downloads of PHP 7.0.0 Beta 1 please visit the download page, Windows source and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/.

The next release will be Beta 2, which is to be released on the 23rd of July. You can also read the full list of planned releases on our wiki.

Thank you for helping us make PHP better.