The first release candidate of PHP 7.0.0 is now available

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 1. This is the sixth 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!

PHP 7.0.0 RC 1 contains fixes for 27 reported bugs, and altogether over 200 commits with various stability improvements for database, array, assert, streams and other functionality.

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.

New in RC1:

- Core:
. Fixed bug #70288 (Apache crash related to ZEND_SEND_REF). (Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70262 (Accessing array crashes PHP 7.0beta3).
(Laruence, Dmitry)
. Fixed bug #70258 (Segfault if do_resize fails to allocated memory).
(Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70253 (segfault at _efree () in zend_alloc.c:1389). (Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70240 (Segfault when doing unset($var());). (Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70223 (Incrementing value returned by magic getter). (Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70215 (Segfault when __invoke is static). (Bob)
. Fixed bug #70207 (Finally is broken with opcache). (Laruence, Dmitry)
. Fixed bug #70173 (ZVAL_COPY_VALUE_EX broken for 32bit Solaris Sparc).
(Laruence, cmb)
. Fixed bug #69487 (SAPI may truncate POST data). (cmb)
. Fixed bug #70198 (Checking liveness does not work as expected).
(Shafreeck Sea, Anatol Belski)
. Fixed bug #70241/#70293 (Skipped assertions affect Generator returns). (Bob)
. Fixed bug #70239 (Creating a huge array doesn't result in exhausted,
but segfault). (Laruence, Anatol)

- CLI server:
. Fixed bug #66606 (Sets HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE but not CONTENT_TYPE).
(wusuopu, cmb)
. Fixed bug #70264 (CLI server directory traversal). (cmb)

- Date:
. Fixed bug #70245 (strtotime does not emit warning when 2nd parameter is
object or string). (cmb)
. Fixed bug #70266 (DateInterval::__construct.interval_spec is not supposed to
be optional). (cmb)
. Fixed bug #70277 (new DateTimeZone($foo) is ignoring text after null byte).
(cmb)

- MCrypt:
. Fixed bug #69833 (mcrypt fd caching not working). (Anatol)

- Opcache:
. Fixed bug #70237 (Empty while and do-while segmentation fault with opcode
on CLI enabled). (Dmitry, Laruence)

- PCRE:
. Fixed bug #70232 (Incorrect bump-along behavior with \K and empty string
match). (cmb)

- PDO:
. Fixed bug #70272 (Segfault in pdo_mysql). (Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70221 (persistent sqlite connection + custom function
segfaults). (Laruence)

- Phpdbg:
. Fixed bug #70214 (FASYNC not defined, needs sys/file.h include). (Bob)

- Standard:
. Fixed bug #70250 (extract() turns array elements to references).
(Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70211 (php 7 ZEND_HASH_IF_FULL_DO_RESIZE use after free).
(Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70208 (Assert breaking access on objects). (Bob)

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