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I agree with you that incompatible changes by removing bad parts is definitely painful, but it makes PHP more sustainable in long term.

This can happen in a more feasible way, e.g. freeze PHP5 (unlike the current situation), don't add any new stuffs; branch out a subset of PHP (removing bad parts), and continue the development there.

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Not sure of what kind of legacy features you would want to be removed but it's not like they are just building on top without thinking.

PHP 5.4 will also drop:

- safe mode

- register_globals

- allow_call_time_pass_reference/y2k_compliance and other legacy ini stuff

- "continue 123" syntax (can be replaced with goto). As far as I recall this is done since it's barely used and if removed would allow to implement some opcode performance optimizations.

Dropping some PHP 4 era syntax is obviously out of question due to already mentioned webhosting and backwards compatibility issues.

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