PHP 5.3.0 released

The PHP development team has announced the release of PHP 5.3.0.
This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.

The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:

Support for namespaces
Late static binding
Lambda Functions and Closures
Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut “?:” and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()
Under the hood performance improvements
Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms
More consistent float rounding
Deprecation notices are now handled via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level
Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

This release also drops several extensions and unifies the usage of internal APIs. Users should be aware of the following known backwards compatibility breaks:

Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more or less strict when it comes to type juggling
Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)
Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf
Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode