Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaredmcateer | Hacker News Reader

The main advantage is that HHVM is available now, PHPNG won't be stable until later this year at best. For my code base HHVM isn't compatible so we're eagerly awaiting the stable release of NG but damned if we didn't try to upgrade to HHVM.

View on HN

The advantage of PHPNG is that it has a dedicated development team who will not go away when Facebook goes the way of Myspace. And, yes, I know it is open source and development can continue. My point still stands.

This is cute wishful thinking, but what exactly makes you think that whatever company is behind PHPNG will outlive friggin' Facebook ?

Facebooks' ties with the NSA spying ring is what makes me think that. Oh, that and showing users their dead relatives pictures surrounded by festive themes around christmas time.

EDIT: I didn't think I would need to mention the obvious reason nhtechie there mentioned. That was my whole point after all, for the ones who understood it before downvoting, but whatever.

You're being downvoted because it's extremely foolish to think that Facebook will collapse due to the dead people on it. My theory is that people don't even know where to start on a rebuttal for such an argument given how absurd it is, so instead, they downvote.

PHPNG is actually the official next version of PHP. If the PHPNG team is dead that means no active development is being done on PHP (period).

If PHPNG dies they simply could elect a different environment to be the official one. Just because PHPNG is "the future" right now doesn't mean the fate of the language is tied to it forever.

It's all well and good labelling HHVM the new official environment, but a lot of existing code does not work on HHVM.

I once thought that Facebook would 'go the way of Myspace' too. But then I attended a USENIX LISA conference and I sat in on some of the Facebook presentations. Initially, I was dismissive of them (I'm too old to be in the social movement), but after seeing the advancements that Facebook are making with Open Compute and looking over some of their source code, I was very impressed. They had the best presentations out of everyone. It was all very surprising to me. And last but not least, the caliber and reputation of their technical staff is as good or better than the other big players. I came away with a much deeper respect for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com