> More to the point, who would use a c++ library from Facebook? Hopefully don't need to explain the reasons here.
Could you explain them for those of us not in the loop? Does Facebook have a bad reputation for C++?
Could you explain them for those of us not in the loop? Does Facebook have a bad reputation for C++?
As far as their work on HHVM, it was necessary due to failure by bad technology choices from the start. There's very little interesting about this work unless you somehow love PHP, want to make debugging your production applications more difficult, and refuse to address your real problems. I am 100% sure no one outside of the PHP community cares about anything Facebook has done in C++.
Simply having a large company with lots of developers who might have even had good reputations elsewhere or even be smart doesn't mean much. Having worked in many places with lots of smart developers, I can tell you stories about too many geniuses in the room. Calling Facebook developers engineers is also about as apt as calling janitors sanitation engineers. We're programmers, or developers, or perhaps software architects at best depending on the position. I happen to have an EE and CS degree but given I do programming for a living, I'd hardly call myself an engineer. But we're way off topic :)
HHVM arose out of Facebook's desire to save on server purchasing and operating costs. Facebook could run perfectly well without it on Plain Old PHP, but they'd have to buy and power more servers.
I'd hardly call PHP a "bad technology choice" given the outstanding financial success of many companies that use it.
I could also probably speculate their thinking along the lines of backdoors or something. But Facebook does have a good reputation with open source projects, so I wouldn't be too worried about that. (As in no more worried than some other random project)