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Comment by halo | Hacker News Reader

The likely rationale is that there's probably quite a few people who want the deployability of PHP without having to work around the problems with the language.

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to be honest though, with the advent of passenger (basically mod_rails), ruby webapps don't feel harder to deploy then PHP at all any more.

I don't see any practical reason to translate Ruby to PHP. Compared to other translations, this one doesn't make sense at all as you don't get any advantages of the translations result.

Compare this to a translator that translates Ruby to JS: Here you get the ability to run Ruby in the browsers. Or JRuby where you get the ability to run Ruby in a Java-only environment (plus a bit of performance in some cases), or IronRuby for the same reasons for the .NET platform.

But PHP? I don't get it.

It might not be impossible to set up, but there are far more webhosts that offer php than rails (and believe it or not, there are plenty of people who are in the market for $2/month webhosting).

I have a feeling that the time to make a rails application transcoded to PHP actually work on a $2/month hoster amounts to much more money than a rails hosting plan, which, after googling for "rails hosting" seems to be available for $4/month.

So unless your time is really cheap ($2/month, that's, considering a 40 hours week $0.0125/hour), you'd be better off just getting a rails hoster.

No. This feels like it's of pure academical value.

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