PHP 6.0 Excitement

12 Aug 2005

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:

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.