We have already talked about PHP6 and the future of PHP with the post about Namespaces and unicode support in PHP. Jeroen van der Meer have posted some interesting points about what’s new in PHP6, explaining that this version will be a big cleanup rather than a massive feature update. The major important thing with PHP6 is that register_globals, magic_quotes and safe_mode functions will disappear, features which was causing lot of problems specially for security. Secondly the work of Rasmus and all other PHP developers around APC (Alternative PHP Cache) will be the major performance key in PHP6 since it will be included in the core.
So we’ve seen quite some interesting changes so far. To me, PHP 6 doesn’t really look like a massive feature update, but more as a big cleanup while improving a lot of existing functions along the way. And I think that’s good! I’m working with PHP on an almost daily basis and looking at the things noted above, I’m only seeing improvements. So hopefully developers of popular applications like phpBB will make their applications work properly on PHP 5 making it easier for web hosts to switch their servers to PHP 5. But at the current state of PHP 5 support, I don’t see PHP 6 becoming widely adopted if it were released today. So hopefully this will change by the time PHP 6 will be released.
More information in the Minutes PHP Developers Meeting
