As for PHP 6 generally: there needs to be a solid migration path,
such as forwards-compatible syntax introduced to PHP 5. MediaWiki
has extensive support for unicode in PHP 5, including a pure PHP
implementation of NFC, cross-script and confusable character
checks, extensive parsing of UTF-8 text using regexes both with and
without /u, and megabytes of localisations in the form of PHP
source files with UTF-8 string literals.
Porting all this to a UTF-16-based environment would be a hassle,
and we don't gain anything from it in terms of features for our
users. I'd hate to end up in an adversarial situation, where
developers working in PHP are forced to boycott or fork PHP 6.
That's why a simple migration path is important.
I don't think that "porting to a UTF-16 environment" in your case is
that hard at all. UTF-8 source files will work transparently with
proper script encoding setting, PCRE regexes work the same way, and
you could replace your own implementations of NFC, etc with PHP
provided ones.
-Andrei
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