I have to agree with Lester. It seems that there is a conspiracy to push annotations into PHP :D No, really, it's like goons decided that PHP needs annotations no matter what and just flooded the mailing list. I think: "The line must be drawn here, this far, no further!" © Star Trek Before adding more major stuff we should cope with what was already added and get it into shape. Traits are getting a rewrite for the 5.5 release and APC can't catch up because of the traits. This is the first big problem that needs to be solved.
Unicode is the second big problem. As far as I know there was some work done on mb_string like enabling func_overload by default, but there are functions missing that are in standard string extension. Just continue on course and get more people involved. Maybe make a roadmap and try to stick with it. 3rd problem is PDO. It lags behind for years and as far as I know from the words of Perrie, no one is willing to touch it and it's a mess. I will not even start on the fact that it lacks tons of functionality and is extremely limiting when you start to do some serious stuff. The fact that virtually every framework bases it's DB layer on the PDO makes it even worse - a fast comparison between PDO and mysqli shows how limiting the PDO is. Just an example, mysqli has mysqli_ping. You can't do that in PDO, so I had to send a query "SELECT NOW()" every 10-15 seconds to the MySQL server to keep the connection alive. Because when PDO looses connection, it gives you an error and you can't just reconnect and continue. Oh, the PHP function API issue, like array vs string. Huge amount of improvements can be done here. This is just what gets into mind and I stumble upon regularly. Maybe these problems should be addressed first before adding more stuff? Arvids.
