This kind of change needs to go through the RFC process, so I'm suspending the bug.

It will not be removed, and should you, or anyone else choose to make an RFC you can link here for reference still.

On a side note; There are people that have gone their whole careers without needing to use weak references, I am one such person: It's a hard case to make that they are *required*.

What you can say is that their functionality is tightly coupled to the current implementation of ZE, and that moving them into the mainline development tree will ensure their compatibility for future versions. 

That may not be a very convincing argument, but it's not false. The argument that they are necessary is obviously false.

> There are people that have gone their whole careers without needing to use weak references

There are also people who have used them throughout their careers; weak references let us do stuff like holding weak object references in a cache so that they can be pulled out only so long as they are still in use *somewhere* within the application, which I've found very useful (useful enough to need to install the PECL weakref module), as it means the object is still only occupying memory for so long as a reference is held to it, but it can be still be retrieved for re-use (especially handy if it's costly to create).

I've also found them useful in handling things like database results that need to be freed before new ones can be fetched; if I hold a weak reference to the last result retrieved, then I can know if it is still being held strongly somewhere in my application, and either produce an error, or trigger some kind of additional buffering so that it can be safely freed without breaking whatever code is still holding onto it (as it may still need to process it).

The WeakMap type of the PECL weakref module is likewise useful, as it allows associating of additional values for objects that I may not have control over, or be able to extend in a useful fashion (or just arbitrary objects in general); since the WeakMap entry expires when the object does, I never need to worry about them creating a memory leak.

There are loads of useful purposes to which to apply WeakRef and WeakMap, and there aren't many object-oriented languages that I'm aware of that don't have support for weak referencing; PHP is one of the few I know of that has that dubious distinction.

WeakReferences[1] are available in the core as of PHP 7.4.0.
WeakMaps[2] have been suggested for inclusion for PHP 8.

[1] <https://www.php.net/weakreference>
[2] <https://wiki.php.net/rfc/weak_maps>