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My understanding is that Facebook has migrated most (all?) of its PHP codebase to Hack, which goes to show you: even the company that built a global empire in P
by atdt 10y ago
My understanding is that Facebook has migrated most (all?) of its PHP codebase to Hack, which goes to show you: even the company that built a global empire in PHP can recognize it for the shitty, inadequate language that it is.
- bigiain 10y ago<devil's advocate> On the other hand, that shitty inadequate language got them up to their first billion or so users and way past Unicorn stage. If you're optimising your language choices and talent pool for your second or third billion users when you currently don't even have enough users to fund the ramen invoices, you're 100% certainly playing around with "the root of all evil"... ;-)
- e1g 10y agoFB's primary reason for creating Hack was to add type-safety to PHP code. They spoke about how PHP was great for the fast development cycle, but would benefit from more structure if the created codebase was to become long lived. So the new Hack code is the same PHP code, only with types (and the implied benefits such static analysis, optimisations, etc). Incidentally, this is also why FB created Flowtype - the lack of types is a massive boost during the code's youth, and a massive burden from early adulthood and onwards. Hack/Flow are a clever way to bridge the gap between typed and nontyped languages.