This reminds me of the discussions around PHP 6 :-) Without commenting on scalar objects (which looks promising), it would be nice if PHP could also ship with a *non-disableable* multibyte extension (most likely mbstring, which I think is more widespread than iconv). Currently a lot of code has to work with conditionals, polyfills, etc. to deal with UTF-8, which is a minimum requirement in a modern app.
Ben
