4 ms·

They're influencing the internet in more ways than just social stuff, though. From a technology perspective, Facebook is doing solid work. And it looks like the

They're influencing the internet in more ways than just social stuff, though. From a technology perspective, Facebook is doing solid work. And it looks like they're continuing the trend - rather than being at the end of it. Facebook's open source footprint is quite influential. Namely, React + Redux + Reselect are pretty sweet. React-Native. Haven't used it, but hhvm. And I haven't heard of this one before, but it looks cool: https://github.com/facebook/prepack https://github.com/facebook/prepack https://github.com/facebook https://github.com/facebook That's a nice portfolio.

bcherny 9y ago
Prepack is one of the coolest ideas to come out of FB OSS. The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. AFAIK, that sort of AoT evaluation has been limited to academia and niche applications in Haskell and OCaml because purity analysis is so tricky in languages that don't track effects.
- ikeyany 9y ago
  > The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. Could you elaborate on what is cool about that? I feel like I'm missing something...sounds like it analyzes javascript to make it run faster.
  - bcherny 9y ago
    If you have some JavaScript code, it goes through a few phases as it's evaluated by your browser: 1. Parsing 2. JIT optimizing 3. Compilation to bytecode 4. Re-optimization as the program runs Steps 1 and 2 are expensive, and there are a few ways to cut down on them: - Removing dead code before you ship - Optimizing your code for the JIT compiler (eg. Closure Compiler does this) - Webassembly - Pre-evaluating your code with Prepack More philosophically, the question is "when does my code run?". The answer has usually been "on the client". With Prepack, the answer is "as much as possible during compilation, and the remainder on the client".
outtaCTRL 9y ago
You can say that now, when they turned their open-source project into truly open-source, and not something they can Trojan horse other companies with. React had BSD + parents licence until they go a lot of criticism.
rupertj 9y ago
HHVM never really took off in the PHP community. These days regular PHP performs as well, and has adopted most of the additions HHVM made to the language. Larger projects like Symfony dropped support for HHVM a while ago. It’s main purpose these days seems to be a thing to run Hack (the langauage) on.

bcherny 9y ago

Prepack is one of the coolest ideas to come out of FB OSS. The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. AFAIK, that sort of AoT evaluation has been limited to academia and niche applications in Haskell and OCaml because purity analysis is so tricky in languages that don't track effects.

ikeyany 9y ago
> The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices. Could you elaborate on what is cool about that? I feel like I'm missing something...sounds like it analyzes javascript to make it run faster.
- bcherny 9y ago
  If you have some JavaScript code, it goes through a few phases as it's evaluated by your browser: 1. Parsing 2. JIT optimizing 3. Compilation to bytecode 4. Re-optimization as the program runs Steps 1 and 2 are expensive, and there are a few ways to cut down on them: - Removing dead code before you ship - Optimizing your code for the JIT compiler (eg. Closure Compiler does this) - Webassembly - Pre-evaluating your code with Prepack More philosophically, the question is "when does my code run?". The answer has usually been "on the client". With Prepack, the answer is "as much as possible during compilation, and the remainder on the client".

outtaCTRL 9y ago

You can say that now, when they turned their open-source project into truly open-source, and not something they can Trojan horse other companies with. React had BSD + parents licence until they go a lot of criticism.

rupertj 9y ago

HHVM never really took off in the PHP community. These days regular PHP performs as well, and has adopted most of the additions HHVM made to the language. Larger projects like Symfony dropped support for HHVM a while ago. It’s main purpose these days seems to be a thing to run Hack (the langauage) on.