Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster

In PHP 5.3+ you can write:

    $image_urls = array_map(function($image) {return 'illos/'. $image['url'];}, $images);

In PHP 5.5+ there may be another way, but we're stuck with 5.3 in production for most clients, so I'm not up to speed.

> And, closures in Python -- and to be fair, just about any language that isn't PHP -- close over variables in the scope they're defined automatically, without having to use PHP's strange "use ($a, $b, $c)" construct.

Mmm, the debate of explicit or implicit scope? Explicit at least gets round those strange errors (hello Javascript) where you think you're referencing one thing... and actually referencing something else.

  image_urls = images.map { |img| "illos/#{img}" }

    $image_urls = array_map(compose(papply('concat', 'illos/'), papply('lookup', 'url')),
                            $images);

Unfortunately relies on a bunch of functions which PHP doesn't include. Unfortunately PHP's stdlib concentrates on incredibly-single-purpose functions for, eg. string manipulation, while ignoring general programming constructs. Also, most of the really useful parts of the language aren't available as functions, for no real reason. In any case, we can define these things ourself like this:

    // Function composition
    function compose($f, $g) {
      return function() use ($f, $g) {
        return $f(call_user_func_array($g, func_get_args()));
      };
    }

    // String concatenation. Unfortunately we can't write "concat = papply('implode', '')"
    function concat() {
      return implode('', func_get_args());
    }

    // Array subscript. I'd prefer to do this the other way around and write an
    // argument-flipping function, but that's unnecessary for this example
    function lookup($x, $y) {
      return $y[$x];
    }

    // Partial application
    function papply() {
      $args = func_get_args();
      return function() use ($args) {
        return call_user_func_array('call_user_func',
                                    array_merge($args, func_get_args()));
      };
    }

PS: I still much prefer Python to PHP, but straw men aren't going to help ;)

On the other hand, <? ?>.

> Also their tests are run without caching for a reason. It's not a test of the language/framework if they just use whatever language to generate a static/cached file and serve it with nginx.

Haha lol, so the tests are explicitly meaningless. I guess I'm done here then.

Any other examples of it panning correctly?

In any case, let's check back in 2 years. I doubt Hack/HHVM will have more than 20% adoption even then. Criteria:

Number of hosting providers supporting it. Number of posts on HN from startups using it. Number of relevant community (forum and blog posts, contributors etc) Number of new projects written for it (GitHub) Number of new books appearing for it. Rank in the Tiobe programming language index.

The difference is that I gave objective and easily checkable statements.

References? I referred to specific items (hosts supporting it: just check the top 10 shared hosting providers), mentions of companies using it (how many have you seen on HN?), compatibility issues (those are documented on the project page), etc.

All of those are references to data sources you can actually check. I'm not going to crunch the numbers for you, but unlike the parent, you don't have to take my word for it.

Pointing to the data themselves is actually more scientific than the "references to data", if by that you mean some websites and news sources feeding you with ready made data points ("20% of developers are thinking of adopting HHVM, we know, we asked 100 of our pals").