On LWN.net there's a new article written up by Jonathan Corbet about the state of PHP6, what it was supposed to be and what it might be in the future.

Rightly or wrongly, many in our community see Perl 6 as the definitive example of vaporware. But what about PHP 6? This release was first discussed by the PHP core developers back in 2005. There have been books on the shelves purporting to cover PHP 6 since at least 2008. But, in March 2010, the PHP 6 release is not out - in fact, it is not even close to out. Recent events suggest that PHP 6 will not be released before 2011 - if, indeed, it is released at all.

He talks about features that were supposed to disappear in PHP6 (with some of them making their way into PHP 5.3) including the Unicode support the language needs more and more. He mentions how the development has stalled out a bit recently but has been spurred back to life when major decisions were made to get away from a PHP 5.4 branch and move back to PHP6.

Be sure to check out the great comments on the post from other PHP developers from all around the web.

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