Facebook readies Hyper-PHP | Hacker News Reader

Facebook readies Hyper-PHP

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38 pointsVonGuard24 comments

More info surfaces on the Facebook rewrite of PHP.

Open articleView on HN

Some other Facebook open source stuff: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

One that I liked a lot: http://phpsh.org/

It's an interactive shell for php like python's and written in python.

That's some serious irony right there.

I have to wonder why people are so excited about a PHP compiler when there's been an open-source one out that runs on top of the IBM Java JIT for a while. http://www.projectzero.org/

Chances are because this is likely to be faster and more compatible. I don't know how what the performance of the IBM one is like but the Quercus pages say "Performance is 4x mod_php and is comparable with PHP accelerator performance.". In other words, about as fast as PHP.

Project Zero isn't open source.

"This community is an experiment in a new way to build commercial software, an approach we are calling Community-Driven Commercial Development.

Community-Driven means that we want feedback, insight, suggestions, criticism, and dialogs with you, the users of Project Zero. This interaction will yield a better solution that targets the problems you have and a technology that truly delivers on its objectives.

Commercial means that this is not an open source project. We are still building commercial software here, as the licensing makes clear, but we are doing it in a more transparent fashion."

http://www.projectzero.org/about/

Yeah, this irks me slightly. No-one gave a crap about phc, but now Facebook is writing a PHP compiler its all over reddit and HN.

There's also Quercus from the Resin folks:

http://quercus.caucho.com/

A Hyper-Hypertext Preprocessor...sounds fast...

LudicrousText preprocessor?

</Spaceball reference>

but but we've never actually preprocessed text at ludicrous speed before...

Faster than Hyper-Personal Home Page, anyway.

While it certainly seems that Facebook will release some sort of PHP compiler tomorrow, this article cited (and linked to) only one (questionable) source.

Are there any credible sources talking about this, because this speculation mostly seems to be based on the questionable interview from last month( http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-interne... )

I have to wonder why they're writing PHP compilers and PHP refactoring tools (in Haskell!) instead of just using something different for their front end.

As a few facebook employees have said they have a lot invested in PHP there so it wouldn't make sense to swap it out.

It's interesting they haven't extended the language in the same way Fog Creek took VBScript/ASP, wrote a compiler for it and then started improving the language (a.k.a. Wasabi). I suppose PHP already implements practically every language feature you could think of (though the quality often divides the minds to put it lightly), so making it even bigger isn't going to make things better.

Or maybe they have and it's kind of got lost in the hype.

With the sort of tech they're working on, a PHP -> something-not-evil compiler seems like a pretty reasonable solution.

Any sort of automated compiler is certainly going to miss out on a lot of the things that make language X better than PHP though would it not? And you're still talking about a rewrite of all their PHP code which I'm sure is no small feat.

You're also ignoring dependencies and such in the form of PHP modules that would have to be redeveloped for the new language. Ensuring your front end developers are just as capable in language X(and handle the retraining/learning curve). Why go through all that trouble when PHP will work just as well for you?

I watched a video (Jeff Hammerbacher maybe? It was a long time ago back when he was still CTO) where the person mentioned that they had already tried to rewrite their frontend once in, I think, Python, but it was such a massive undertaking and would've frozen their product for so long that the project was killed.

Just to be clear, I was never CTO of Facebook or anything close to it (thanks for that, though!). Dustin Moskovitz and Adam D'Angelo were the only two folks to hold that title that I know about.

And yeah, I don't want to get in trouble, but ask the right people about "Team America"...

Sorry for the title mixup, I saw the video of the talk you gave at Yahoo Brickhouse a long time ago. It was very helpful at the time; I was only just starting to get into user tracking and analysis. Thanks

Maybe they just don't think PHP is such a bad choice. Any comparable language would probably require refactoring/optimizing tools, so these aren't a reason to switch on their own, they have a lot of legacy PHP code and developers who are familiar with it, and PHP powers quite a few FB-sized websites.

The opinion of some FB engineers is that if they could start all over, they probably wouldn't use php. The codebase is very large and somewhat of a hassle to maintain, but at this point it does not make sense to move off php.

Facebook does have a faster php, but nobody is allowed to talk about it yet other than to subtly confirm its existence and that they're quite excited about it.

Also, it's just the front end, which is PHP's strength.

Believe it or not, PHP has come quite a bit in the recent years, and with some good developers, it's perfectly possible to write good, decent code in it.

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