Ask HN: Do you think PHP has improved with PHP 7?

It still has many of the same problems old PHP has. More speed is always great, but speed wasn't PHP's major issue. It's still mired in an interpreter that has a lot of issues with more abstract/higher level stuff (though I will say that's getting far better), and a team that doesn't embrace BC breaks as much as they should (my opinion - the stdlib sucks).

Extensions have always been PHP's strong point, but some newer stuff isn't as supported as well as it is in Python or Node because of PHP's lack of good async code.

Overall it's a step in the right direction, but PHP needs more big changes.

As a programmer of many years, I don't jump onto new features till they are very commonplace, If I were to implement PHP7 right now I would be hard pressed to find hosting that supports it.

I have PHP7 on my dev system, had to make some adjustments to get my 5.x code working again due to deprecation and syntax enforcement this included a couple lines in the TCPDF library I use. So for me the immediate impact of PHP7 will be the breaking of some legacy code. Then maybe, in a few years, the new features will be ubiquitous enough for me to implement.

Can't speak to it myself just yet but I'll be moving a big web app from 5.6 to 7 in the new year and I'm hoping the good news I've heard so far holds true. I think there was a recent post from Slack(?) who mentioned some nice improvements.

For any curious former-PHP developers like myself: http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.php

Speaking as former PHP developer, yes. Immensely. Very impressive feature set and performance. Now just the jit is missing.