I've been excited/anxious to work with PHP6 I've only been around from PHP4 to 5 How much longer are "they" going to make us wait until the release of PHP6? What is good advice for early adopters? Is it more risky from a security standpoint than using proven concepts with PHP5?
When I started with php a couple of years ago, there were people who said php 6 would release soon, and that it was better to wait with learning php till this version was released. At this moment, there is still no release date of php 6, and it doesn't look there will be one in the near future either. Most of the features for php 6 are already added in the latest versions of php 5. The biggest differences with php 5: 1. There are no more globals, and superglobals should be used in stead (Something which you probably already did) 2.No more Magic Quotes and probably no more mysql_query, which should help safety a lot (Use PDO instead) 3.No more safemode 4.Introduction of Namespaces (No more long class names) 5.Goto support (Which the newest versions of php 5 already have) 6.Shortened ifsetor
They will for sure release PHP 6 when it will be very safe. A lot of tests need to be performed first. Anyway, there is not so much big differences so switching to the new version will take a while.
Is 6 going to be more/less secure than 5? The only way to know is to run 6 - when it's released - and run security programs against it. Which a lot of us will do before putting it on a production server. If things run as expected, there will be some security holes in the first release. The last programmer who never made a mistake hasn't been born yet. Neither have his great-grandparents. (I hope there are no typos in this post - I usually type in fluent Typonese.)