More recent versions of PHP are built with VC11, VC14 or VC15 (Visual Studio 2012, 2015 or 2017 compiler respectively) and include improvements in performance and stability.
- The VC11 builds require to have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 x86 or x64 installed
- The VC14 builds require to have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 x86 or x64 installed
- The VC15 builds require to have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017 x64 or x86 installed
TS refers to multithread capable builds. NTS refers to single thread only builds. Use case for TS binaries involves interaction with a multithreaded SAPI and PHP loaded as a module into a web server. For NTS binaries the widespread use case is interaction with a web server through the FastCGI protocol, utilizing no multithreading (but also for example CLI).