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)