[wp-hackers] call time pass by reference (PHP 5.4 in-compatibilities)

[Vid Luther]

Hey everyone,
 It's been a while since I posted here. I'm running into an issue, where
we're seeing measurable performance gains by running sites on PHP 5.4,
except every now and then we run into plugins that pass variables by
reference to functions.

This was deprecated in PHP 5.0, and is backwards incompatible as of PHP
5.4.0
For plugins that are passing stuff around to themselves, the fixes are
easy. We're passing patches back to the authors of those plugins as
necessary.

But every now and then, especially in BuddyPress, we run into this issue
where lots of calls are being made to do_action() and apply_filters()

This means the core functions need their declarations changed.
I'm wondering how big of an undertaking this is, since this is supported
through PHP 5.0, changing the declaration should not have any adverse
effects.

More info can be found here:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.allow-call-time-pass-reference

If this should be a Trac ticket, I'll do that.