Hacker News Reader

Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

Love the work, but honestly by the time PHP 5.7 is ready for mainstream (with extension support mysqli, memcache, mongo), Facebook HHVM will be the defacto standard. FB has a huge head start and can throw nearly unlimited money and engineering hours at the problem. Seems like a losing battle, but perhaps I am wrong.

View on HN

PHP's success is the result of PHP being available at even the tiniest webhost. I don't see that happen for FaceBook HHVM, though. FaceBook HHVM performance results will spur on Zend's efforts in making the PHP engine faster, though.

No one ever says that the different python implementations are fighting a losing battle. People generally seem to say that having multiple implementations is good for the language.

When there is only one, people tend to confuse implementation with language.

Additionally there is also a way to sort out possible bugs in language specification, as differences across implementations are sorted out.

Not likely. HHVM is Facebook's private implementation and it would require a lot of time for it to be anywhere near wide acceptance, let alone "de facto standard".

>>> an throw nearly unlimited money and engineering hours at the problem

They can, but they won't. Because it already works for them, so the amount of resources they are willing to commit to something that no longer gives any upside to them will be limited.

>>> Seems like a losing battle, but perhaps I am wrong.

There's no battle and this is not a zero sum game. HHVM will have its market and standard PHP engine will have its market.

It's Facebook, not FaceBook. Spelling it like that makes reading it jarring.

90% of people write DropBox, as well ;)

Only PhP PeoPle

Reply on news.ycombinator.com