The second release candidate of PHP 7 is now available

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 2. This is the seventh 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 2 contains fixes for 28 reported bugs, 7 of which are security related, and altogether over 250 commits with various improvements.

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.

03 Sep 2015, PHP 7.0.0 RC 2

- Core:
. Fixed bug #70398 (SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault zend_ast_destroy_ex).
(Dmitry, Bob, Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70332 (Wrong behavior while returning reference on object).
(Laruence, Dmitry)
. Fixed bug #70300 (Syntactical inconsistency with new group use syntax).
(marcio dot web2 at gmail dot com)
. Fixed bug #70321 (Magic getter breaks reference to array property).
(Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70187 (Notice: unserialize(): Unexpected end of serialized data)
(Dmitry)
. Fixed bug #70145 (From field incorrectly parsed from headers). (Anatol)
. Fixed bug #70370 (Bundled libtool.m4 doesn't handle FreeBSD 10 when
building extensions). (Adam)
. Fixed bug causing exception traces with anon classes to be truncated. (Bob)
. Fixed bug #70397 (Segmentation fault when using Closure::call and yield).
(Bob)

- Curl:
. Fixed bug #70330 (Segmentation Fault with multiple "curl_copy_handle").
(Laruence)

- EXIF:
. Fixed bug #70385 (Buffer over-read in exif_read_data with TIFF IFD tag byte
value of 32 bytes). (Stas)

- hash:
. Fixed bug #70312 (HAVAL gives wrong hashes in specific cases). (letsgolee
at naver dot com)

- Mysqli:
. Fixed bug #32490 (constructor of mysqli has wrong name). (cmb)

- Pcntl:
. Fixed bug #70386 (Can't compile on NetBSD because of missing WCONTINUED
and WIFCONTINUED). (Matteo)

- PCRE:
. Fixed bug #70232 (Incorrect bump-along behavior with \K and empty string
match). (cmb)
. Fixed bug #70345 (Multiple vulnerabilities related to PCRE functions).
(Anatol Belski)

- PDO:
- Fixed bug #70389 (PDO constructor changes unrelated variables). (Laruence)

- PDO_OCI:
. Fixed bug #70308 (PDO::ATTR_PREFETCH is ignored). (Chris Jones)

- SOAP:
. Fixed bug #70388 (SOAP serialize_function_call() type confusion / RCE).
(Stas)

- SPL:
. Fixed bug #70303 (Incorrect constructor reflection for ArrayObject). (cmb)

- Standard:
. Fixed bug #70342 (changing configuration with ignore_user_abort(true) isn't
working). (Laruence)
. Fixed bug #70295 (Segmentation fault with setrawcookie). (Bob)
. Fixed bug #67131 (setcookie() conditional for empty values not met). (cmb)
. Fixed bug #70365 (Use-after-free vulnerability in unserialize() with
SplObjectStorage). (taoguangchen at icloud dot com)
. Fixed bug #70366 (Use-after-free vulnerability in unserialize() with
SplDoublyLinkedList). (taoguangchen at icloud dot com)

- Reflection:
. Fixed bug causing bogus traces for ReflectionGenerator::getTrace(). (Bob)

- XSLT:
. Fixed bug #69782 (NULL pointer dereference). (Stas)

- ZIP:
. Fixed bug #70350 (ZipArchive::extractTo allows for directory traversal when
creating directories). (neal at fb dot com)

  PHP 7.0.0 RC 2 Released