A few moments ago I pushed the buttons and PHP 5.3.29 came out. As this is the final release for 5.3 it is a good time to look back. PHP 5.3's history starts somewhere in 2005. We knew what a pressure point of PHP was - a language made for solving The Web Problem needs a good Unicode story. So some developers went deep into that complex area and created a prototype version of PHP with Unicode support from deep within the engine. As this was a big and pressing issue and the need was obvious and the solution looked promising it was quickly areed on making that the base for a future PHP 6. And then time passed, initial enthusiasm passed and the sheer amount of work became obvious. Two years in we noticed that the ongoing PHP 6 work blocked other work - new features couldn't be added to 5.2, the current version at that time, and adding them to (at that time) CVS's HEAD.