PHP Creator Asks, Is Facebook's HipHop Just a 'Nifty Trick'?

i.e., he described the project as a "nifty trick", not "just a nifty trick", which is an important distinction.

Also, he advocates -- shock -- tuning your PHP code before turning to tools like this.

...Somehow, that turned into him asking if it was "just a nifty trick".

This should probably be flagged, it's nonsense.

As someone who can proudly admit to loving PHP (she makes me $) im fairly interested in HipHop. I've been thinking about this problem in PHP for some time, and was this || close to doing exactly what facebook has done.

The ability to write PHP and have it transformed down to C++ and compiled is pretty sweet. Its PHP with out the PHP. Sure its brand-spanking-new so we all need to watch and see whats to come. I mean; code is still not released.

Good advice, and one that I've been guilty of myself. Often I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time on the fixes and enhancements that are unlikely to yield a huge improvement, instead of focusing on larger issues, because they're harder or just because everyone is talking about the new shiny tool.

Not to take the analogy too far, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs do this in a business sense as well, focusing efforts on the new shiny things (Facebook, Twitter) instead of the more boring, but proven tools (phone, email). The bottom line is that you should be strategic in where you spend your time, instead of chasing whatever the cool kids are talking about.

"My "nifty trick" comment to RWW wasn't meant to be negative or belittling of HipHop PHP in any way. Check the comments http://bit.ly/cH1qyV @rasmus

Happily Facebook have an internal lightweight profiler they've open-sourced called XHProf:

http://mirror.facebook.net/facebook/xhprof/doc.html

It provides a web-based instant view of the results, and while it's not as extensive as XDebug, it's perfect for 95% of my investigations. Just a shame no one's ever heard of it!