PHP 5.5 Beta Brings New Accelerator

The first beta of PHP 5.5 was released, which marks the feature freeze for the scripting language. One major feature to PHP 5.5 is the introduction of the Zend Optimizer+ engine.

Zend Optimizer+ is the new opcode cache and optimizer that was open-sourced by Zend Technologies after already being part of their proprietary Zend Server software. Zend Optimizer+ optimizes the PHP bytecode and is able to store pre-compiled bytecode in shared memory. More information on the optimizer is covered by the PHP Wiki.

Also new to PHP 5.5 is an array_column() function, bug-fixes, support for changing the process title in CLI/CLI-Server SAPIs, support for non-scalar iterator keys in foreach loops, and much more.

More details are covered by the PHP 5.5 Beta 1 NEWS file. The next beta is expected in April of PHP 5.5.