PHP6?

Have you already play with PHP6?
Today I discovered the PHP6 CVS snapshots and I decided to take a look at it (still not tested).

I read some unhappy comment to the fact php want to put the Unicode settings into the php.ini, but if this change will make PHP faster  I would prefer in this way, expecially if unicode will be always set to on.
Is there a reason to put unicode support off in this world? (for example I haven’t still understood why wxPython continues to releases both ansi and unicode builds…)
Finally register globals‘ PHP3 BC to go!
Namespaces. Maybe they will add namespace.. I really hope so! This is indeed one of the most awaited features for me! (read about a discussion on namespaces)
Support for delegates.

My big hope is also to see a “real” strict type language, but this is only my though.
Backward Compatibility. Well this could cause a flame for many developers but if they really want to make a solid new product from scratch probably they dont have to take care about BC.

Read more about the PHP6 Novermber meeting and all the proposals.
Download the PHP6 snapshot

PHP5: a big failure ?

What’s happening ?
PHP 5 has been presented as a revolution, a lot of new features have been added and a lot of projects have been made. But only a small group of hosters seem interested in supporting PHP 5 on their web servers. It is not so useful to have a beautiful programming language to use if we can’t apply it to production environments.
But what about the causes ? Maybe they are related to the fact that Zend decided to support both PHP 4 and 5 separately, allowing hoster to choose which version to compile on their webservers, or maybe to the fact that PHP 5 is not fully compatible with the older versions, and there are some security-related bugs that increase our doubts.
I’m using a lot PHP 5 in production environments, without any problem. It is quite fast and reliable, and has got a lot of useful features that adapt perfectly to enterprise development. We MUST use PHP 5 to help it growing until it become the standard …
To conclude I’d like to inform the ones who don’t know it, that PHP team is working on the sixth version (yes … PHP 6 … and it is available for download at snaps.php.net) that will add to the language a lot of interesting features, such as native support to Unicode.
I hope there will be only one (working) version of PHP in the future …