What is the holdup on PHP 6?

Question

I've read in multiple places, including highly recommended PHP books published several years ago, that PHP 6 was just over the horizon, and would fix several of the BIG outstanding issues with PHP (namely unicode support). However, its been several years even since I've read those books, and PHP 6 is still not considered kosher for production use.

Is there a specific feature that is proving difficult to implement or is it a simple lack of community desire to develop PHP 6?

Answer 1

They're having issues with Unicode support. See also resetting PHP.

Answer 2

Php 6 has not been relased as a stable product yet. Therefor no one should use it for a serious project.

Answer 3

I think the correct answer here is going to be multiple:

[and just to be clear, we're talking about the 'finishing' of php6, not why people aren't using it :P ]

1. Lack of consensus on some of the major directions.
2. Politics
3. Lack of a reason to release it quickly. In this case, quality is MUCH better than the speed of delivery. I'm pretty sure most serious php developers would rather see standardized stable development rather than a fast release, and the php maintainers are being wise to appreciate this. On top of that, php5 is pretty awesome, and there's still a lot of servers running php4.

Answer 4

The recent release of PHP 5.3 included most of what was originally desirable about PHP6. At last year's Zendcon there was a presentation titled "State of PHP 6", you can see the slides of this presentation here: http://zmievski.org/files/talks/zendcon-2009/php-code-ideas-people.pdf