Backwards Compatibility breaks galore Who has been affected by this, and which thing? We try not to break BC at all, but we're still human PHP crashes all the time Could just as well been something else... like bad code (infinite recursion) And where is the backtrace/bug report? But references caused problems! Yes, they did – and this was fixed It wasn't fixed correctly, as it started throwing notices Only if you abused references before Why does PHP memory leak?