What would you like to see in PHP 6?

By Justin Silverton

In November of 2005, the major developers working on the core of PHP met up in Paris and discussed various additions that would possibly make version 6.

The attendees

Marcus Börger (SOMABO)
Wez Furlong (OmniTI)
Rasmus Lerdorf (Yahoo!)
Derick Rethans (eZ systems)
Dmitry Stogov (Zend)
Zeev Suraski (Zend)
Jani Taskinen
Andrei Zmievski (Yahoo!)

The following are a list of the top 5 additions I think should be made (in no particular order):

1) Filename Encoding

issue: Files on a file system can have names encoded in different character sets. For example Windows can make use of it's UTF16 based filename API, while on Linux it simply depends on the application

2) optimizing []

issue: Currently using the [] operator to select an arbitrary character is very slow as PHP needs to start scanning the string from the start.

3) register_globals

issue: This causes many security issues and should be removed completly. I still encouter PHP scripts that make use of the this feature.

4) 64-bit integer

issue: With 64-bit processing in the horizen, this will come in handy for future (and some present) apps.

5) built-in opcode cache

issue: When an opcode caching system is installed (such as zend or ion cube), script execution time is much better.

A list of everything discussed can be found Here