According to this note from PHP Magazine and this note from php.eckspee.com PHP 5 RC3RC1 should be just on the horizion.

PHP 5 RC3RC1 (Sanity Check) is out for testing before PHP5 RC3 release. If everything looks alright we'll have the final Release Candidate release tomorrow. If you can't wait until tomorrow grab the files from here.

With PHP 5 Release Candidate 3: the PDFLib extension has now moved to PECL, support has been added for dumping private/protected properties to var_dump, count support has been added for COM arrays, class type hints for function parameters have been changed to disallow the passing of NULL values, and tidy_node has been changed to tidyNode and tidy_extension has been removed.

Looks like some great improvements there, and tomorrow we'll see just how good things are (and one step closer to the final!)...