> I strongly doubt PHP is going to ever make any breaking changes anymore, short of ones needed to fix Heartbleed-intensity security bugs. The core team has sho

> I strongly doubt PHP is going to ever make any breaking changes anymore, short of ones needed to fix Heartbleed-intensity security bugs. The core team has shown how much awesomeness can be reached without making those breaking changes. Some holes will never be plugged, but you can't have it all. I'm sorry to say that this is not an accurate portrayal of how PHP is to be developed in the future. There will be a new major version of PHP: so-called PHP 7 to avoid confusion with the defunct first attempt at a PHP 5 successor.[1] This new major version will contain a completely new engine[2] that is definitely not backwards-compatible with PHP 5 extensions (though it should be backwards-compatible with userland code). The new major version also opens the door for any userland-level breaking to the language; the first three of which are a change to integer semantics,[3] an AST,[4] and a uniform variable syntax.[5] Instead, I'd characterize PHP 5.3-5.6 as more pragmatic than visionary: PHP 6's major backwards-incompatible feature was going to be full Unicode support, and when that didn't pan out, PHP 6 no longer had a raison d'être. Instead of holding onto a number of useful language features for a few more years until a new major backwards-incompatible change was developed (now the new parse engine), they backported them to PHP 5. [1]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php6 https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php6 [2]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/phpng https://wiki.php.net/rfc/phpng [3]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/integer_semantics https://wiki.php.net/rfc/integer_semantics [4]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/abstract_syntax_tree https://wiki.php.net/rfc/abstract_syntax_tree [5]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/uniform_variable_syntax https://wiki.php.net/rfc/uniform_variable_syntax