Now that Derick has renamed HEAD to 6.0, it's time to look ahead at all the great things that are (or might be) in PHP's future. Of course, a major driving factor in PHP's evolution is the Unicode support that Andrei is now merging in. This alone is enough to generate some excitement - Andrei's goal is to make PHP as good as or better than any other Web development language out there when it comes to Unicode support.

Something I'm also excited about is a new input filter extension that Derick is developing. This looks like it is going to be a great tool for security-conscious PHP developers.

The latest news is from an email Rasmus sent to the internals list earlier today. He mentions doing a bit of spring cleaning and proposes getting rid of several PHP features, including:

• register_globals
• magic_quotes
• safe_mode

I've been wanting PHP to get rid of these things for years, and apparently I'm not alone - the responses have been very supportive. Rasmus also mentions bundling an opcode cache such as APC and removing some stuff that has been deprecated for a long time.

In related news, there is a namespace patch that looks interesting.