PHP 5.3 Released

Sudheer writes "The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes. Some of the key new features include: namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo), over 140 bug fixes and much more."

Comments

Looking Forward To It

[TheNinjaroach]

Say what you will about PHP, but it puts food on my table and a good roof over my head. I have been clamoring for the new features in PHP 5.3.0 (closures, namespaces, they finally killed register_globals) and can't wait for the improvements coming in 6.

I truly appreciate the hard work of the PHP development team and the free language they have given us, congratulations on the new release.

Re:Would you let it die already?

[iluvcapra]

I think if the functions, calling conventions and naming were regularized

...and they removed the sigils, and removed the silent type coercion, and eliminated the "@" function prefix, and removed the "global" keyword, and removed the weird "list" lvalue function that looks-like-functional-pattern-matching-but-really-just-cosmetically, and fixed the pass-by-reference semantic...

But if you did all of these things, it really wouldn't be PHP anymore.