Performance Improvements FastCGI request handling better memory handling startup/shutdown repeated run-time function binding string constants access to global constants access to static properties empty hashes @ operator unserialize() ✔ Built-in Web Server ✔ Traits aka Horizontal Code Reuse         (Compiler-assisted Copy-and-Paste) ✔ Short Array Syntax 'orange', 'bar' => 'apple']; ]]> ✔ Function Array Dereferencing ]]> ✔ $this from current scope supported in Closures prop); }; } } $a = new Foo; $func = $a->getPrinter(); $func(); // Outputs: Bar ?>]]> ✔ <?= is now always available ✔ New Session Object ✔ Callable Typehint ✔ Better support for asian chars in htmlspecialchars/htmlentities ✔ Multibyte support is now configurable at runtime ✔ JSON Improvements JsonSerializable $this->data); } } echo json_encode(new Foo); // Outputs: {"data":"Bar"}]]> ✔ mysqlnd used by default everywhere ✔ iterator support added to mysqli (mysqli_result implements Traversable) ✔ Binary notation ✔ AES Support added to OpenSSL ✔ Tokyo Cabinet and DB5 support added to dba ✔ Added stack frame count arg to debug_backtrace() ✔ $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT'] added ✔ Apache 2.4 support on Windows