FSM willing, PHP 5.6 should be within a fortnight of release by the time of DrupalCon Austin. As the third release since annual releases were adopted, it continues the trend of 5.4 and 5.5 by providing incremental improvements over the long running PHP 5 series while trying very hard not to break backward compatibility. In this talk, I’ll describe what PHP 5.6 provides with particular focus on features that are likely to be useful in Drupal development, look back at how distributions and server hosts have handled the faster pace of PHP releases, and talk about the increasing clamour for a new, backward compatibility breaking major version of PHP and how that might be handled, with particular reference to other languages that have attempted the same trick with varying degrees of success (from Perl to Python to Ruby).