Following up on all of the craziness that was caused by the suggestion of including type hinting into the PHP core, Ilia Alshaetsky recently posted some of his thoughts on how things turned out and where he'll go from here.

Unfortunately, while initial outpouring of support for inclusion of type hinting into PHP 5.3 and 6 was substantial, it all kinda petered out once more people started voting. To be specific, there is a large amount of support for the feature in general, but very few people seem to think it should go into 5.3. [...] That said, at work we will transition to 5.3 soon, probably around 5.3.2/3 time, so I do need a type hinting patch. To that effect I've cleaned up and improved the old patch based on comments from various people, notably Stas and Dmitry (thank guys) and made a copy that I intend to use for work.

He talks about how the patch works - no more virtual types and no casting support. Three things have been changed to make it all work: modification to the parser, added a getTypeHint function, properly parse type hints in the code.