Hacker News Reader

So they dropped some rarely used functionality from PHP,... like serialization.

Excuse me, "rarely used"?? Drupal strongly depends on serialization, to store data structures in the database (or, as they call it, "the cache").

You cannot effectively run Drupal without serialization. So "The likes of Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress are now using HipHop." sounds like it cannot be true.

View on HN

I think they're referring to how APC serializes data structures internally, not the serialize() function. I might be wrong, but that's how I read it.

edit: https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/Unimplemented-Fu...

That's a list of unimplemented functions - unserialize_callback_func is unimplemented, but that's it wrt serialization functions.

Except APC doesn't actually serialize anything except for objects. Arrays and scalar types are directly memcpy'ed in and out of the APC user cache. But this author is extremely confused. I think he may have confused APC with Memcache here. They have done some work on the PHP Memcache extension to remove the need to serialize making it behave more like APC.

I think Facebook is worried more about scale, hence HipHop. Drupal doesn't scale well at all and shouldn't be used as an example of what's best practice. Otherwise we'd see tons of products having function chains longer than a tapeworm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com