The first RC of 5.2.4 has been released. Though it took a few months to reach this point and addition of new features was allowed, the change log is long. Some of the primary changes include three new extensions (filter, json and zip), the date extension had the rest of its functionality enabled, much work has been done in terms of getting PHP 5.2 to run faster and more efficiently (in terms on memory usage). There have also been nearly 80 bug fixes made to existing functionality, which should translate to a more stable release.

The source packages can be found here.