3 ms·
That’s a simple question that’s hard to answer. A slightly different question that’s a bit easier to answer: “if I could wave a magic wand and X million lines
by muglug 3y ago
That’s a simple question that’s hard to answer.
A slightly different question that’s a bit easier to answer: “if I could wave a magic wand and X million lines of code were instantly rewritten and all developers were instantly trained on that language”.
There the choice would be limited to languages that have similar or faster perf characteristics to Hack, without sacrificing developer productivity.
Rust is out of the question (compile times for hundreds of devs would instantly sap productivity). PHP, Ruby, Node and Python are too slow — for the moment at least.
So it would be either Hack or Go. I don’t know enough about JVM languages to know whether they would be a good fit.
- alberth 3y agoI like your question way better than mine :) Some follow-up … A. isn’t PHP on par perf wise to Hack these days? Re: “PHP is too slow” comment. B. have you ever looked into PHP-NGX? It’s perf looks impressive, though you lose the benefit of stateless https://github.com/rryqszq4/ngx-php https://github.com/rryqszq4/ngx-php https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21
- muglug 3y ago> isn’t PHP on par perf wise to Hack these days? No. But I don't have any numbers, because it's been years since the two languages were directly comparable on anything but a teeny tiny example program. Facebook gets big cost savings from a 1% improvement in performance, so they make sure that performance is as good as it can possibly be. They have a team of engineers working on the problem. PHP doesn't have any engineers working on performance full-time — it's impossible for the language to compete there. Hack has also removed a bunch of PHP constructs (e.g. magic methods) that are a drain on performance, so there's no way to close the gap. But that should in no way make you choose Hack over PHP. Apart from anything else, the delta won't matter for 99.9% of websites.
- tacker2000 3y agoYes, Hack is for Google or FB scale stuff. But to be honest, Slack is probably up there also, so it makes sense
- tacker2000 3y agoPHP served by an nginx (never saw the abbreviation NGX to be honest) server is standard procedure in PHP land. Other alternatives are Apache, Caddy, and more…
- davedx 3y agoNot erlang?
- conradfr 3y agoBut Discord uses Rust to improve performance bottlenecks in OTP ;)
- syspec 3y agoThank you for being brave enough not to suggest Rust.