These sound like useful improvements, especially the new getter/setter syntax and scalar type hinting.

However, what I'd really like to see in next PHP would be the Composer dependency manager bundled in, a bit like Node.js nowadays ships with NPM. This has really brought a new world of cross-project code sharing into PHP:

http://packagist.org/

I wrote a blog post on why this is important for improving the state of PHP:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/composer_solves_the_php_code-shari...