Saw an article on InfoWorld about the PHP6 project ending.
PHP5.4, to be released early next year (so hopefully in just a few months) will have some of the language support increased without the problem of increased memory use forced on everyone… and 5.4 will support a multiple inheritance model known as Traits, which sounds interesting (like Roles and Traits from other languages). Also, deprecated stuff is actually getting removed! I hope that includes magic quotes and globals.
It states some of the reasons in the article, namely that using xxxx xxxx Unicode was slowing the language (I assume the interpreter) down.
PHP6 always made me think of Perl6, except Perl6 started going somewhere around 2008. : ) But like with Perl6 features being backported to Perl5, PHP6 stuff was making its way to PHP5 for a while now.