Most interesting things for me:

* PHP is getting the yield keyword (i.e. generators and coroutines), which many other languages have had for a while.

* A sensible and simple built-in password hashing API

* Error when using the deprecated mysql extension, which should hopefully get more people moving to PDO (e.g. WordPress: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21663 )

I'm trying to push for that WordPress ticket, but it's unlikely that we'll get any significant traction for a while. The database class in WP (apart from being fairly horrible) is a huge component to make major changes to like that, and we have to consider backwards compatibility.

Here's hoping it gets merged in the next 5 major releases. I'm not holding my breath.

For the last one, won't people just move to the mysqli_* function group instead? It's almost identical API-wise.

Line 11 is "Added simplified password hashing API"

Only if you're using them in the first place. Most people deploy in Linux. Hence, totally irrelevant for them.

Deploy yes, but not develop with. Most people don't really use virtual machines (vagrant and friends) if they have XP.

I would say that people who develop on XP are even fewer than those who deploy on XP. It's a 12 year old OS -- surely they have moved to Vista, 7 or 8 by now.

You would think, my employer is still running XP on the developers machines, with no plan on an upgrade in the near future.

Run, don't walk (if you can).

And PHP finally gets finally, I guess.