Remi announced RC8 as Gold:
PHP Version 7.0.0 is released!
By Remi Thursday, December 3, 2015, 9:20 p.m
I’ve read on PHPv7 vs HHVM including benchmarks. These two developments are pursuing similar technology and the performance is achieving similar step-wise improvements. At this point, the two camps are trading off benchmarks to show one side leading the other. I view that as mostly irrelevant as the gains over previous generations renders the differences between current gens mostly irrelevant. Benchmarks for most recent release of HHVM show up better than PHP7, however, PHP7 is expected to show continued improvement that at least catches up. Thus the relative differences are minor and probably will converge on the same end points. I suppose that greater gains might be had from optimizations made to the various applications such as CMS platforms including Joomla, Wordpress and eCommerce platforms Magento, etc.