A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude - Oscar Wilde
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Facebook rewrites PHP
A POSTING at an SD Times blog suggests that Facebook has rewritten its PHP runtime from scratch.
Alex Handy updated his post to indicate that he now believes that instead of a completely new runtime, Facebook actually intends to release a compiler for PHP.
Apparently, a week ago, the core PHP team was invited to the Facebook campus and asked to sign an NDA where the project was revealed in detail.
Alex Handy understands that Facebook hired someone two years ago to perform the rewrite, and believes it was a one-man job from start to finish.
Whether Facebook produces a runtime or a compiler, this comes as a slap in the face to Zend, which will obviously contest the suggestion that PHP is slow under its Zend Engine virtual machine.
By building a compiler to make PHP a pre-compiled language, Facebook would hope to provide drastic improvements to the speed of its applications and software, without the use of a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine.
Handy believes this will "push PHP into Facebook's corner of the world", and it's easy to see why - any considerable performance benefit for an established, widespread technology will be welcomed with open arms.
On Tuesday Facebook will make an announcement taking the development public, and is expected to make it available as open source software. µ
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Yeah, if facebook would function now, that would be great. But it sucks, so much is not functioning, as of today.
This article and the blog posting on which it was based seem to present the authors' guesses as fact, or as a way to say there's something wrong with PHP. No one knows yet what Facebook has been doing with PHP, except that they favor PHP enough to invest in it. Perhaps Facebook built some optimizations that suited their specific needs. This is fine, and a strong benefit of open source software such as PHP.
Nothing like a hearsay rumor about a crap team of devs. PHP has several precompilers XCache and APC being the most prevalent and currently maintained.
Besides, the only thing that slows down PHP is bad code and heavyweight processes (apache_mod comes to mind). I suppose if they wanted to squeeze out more from each server they could make a custom compile dropping all modules they don't need (which they should be doing anyway) and using lightweight process management like FPM or Lighttpd.
My guess is that either they're idiots or there are specific operations that they use extensively that are core to php (like UTF transfer/conversion) that could be done with tweaks.
Thanks for publishing yet another article that dogs on the most popular web server language in use spreading FUD using out-dated assumptions.
I hear Java is still super slow (even though it runs just about all enterprise software) and nobody uses javascript because we already have VBScript.
There are several php compilers/optimizers already, even microsoft has a free one it installs with their web platform.
I'm a bit curious how this one will differ from the others. Many of the others seems to have been abandoned projects.
seriously, telling people that your language is what powers facebook is like saying I was the designer for just about any American model car. It doesn't carry much weight and noone really cares.
Well, judging by the quality of Facebook, I think I will switch to .NET products...
Now that explains why it doesn't work most of the time1