What is coming in PHP 6?

Question

What is upcoming in the new release of PHP, and why should I care? What problems will these improvements help to solve?

Cheers,

Edit: After posting the question I have found these links that also provide some insight.

• php NEWS - http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/php-src/NEWS?view=markup
• IBM - The future of PHP - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-future/

Answer 1

• Unicode support, which will allow you to seamlessly use multiple languages within your applications. Programmers in non-English-speaking countries will even be able to name their functions and classes in their own native language.

• Some advanced OO concepts such as namespaces and late static binding.

• Removal of ereg extension, 'register_globals', 'magic_quotes' and 'safe_mode'

• Alternative PHP Cache

• foreach($nested_arrays as list($a,$b))

Answer 2

Before 6.0 there's PHP 5.3, which will include:

• namespaces
• anonymous functions and closures
• __callStatic() and dynamic static calls
• late static binding
• PHAR archives
• new SPL data-structure classes:
  • SplStack
  • SplQueue and SplPriorityQueue
  • SplHeap, SplMaxHeap and SplMinHeap
  • SplDoublyLinkedList

PHP 6.0 will add to that native UTF-8 support in all functions including PHP parser itself (meaning, that you'll be able to use UTF-8 variable and functions names). As with all new releases, there will be some cleanup, removing obsolete extensions (like e.g. ereg), and bundling in by default some extensions from PECL (e.g. APC).

Read more at IBM's developerWorks.

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BTW. XMLWriter is nothing new, it's been in PHP since 5.1

Answer 3

Most of the new features have been backported to 5.3, so the only major change in 6.0, will be native unicode support for strings (UTF-8 is not the same as unicode, for the record).

Answer 4

Official TODO list for PHP6.