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I should have expected someone with more knowledge of the system on HackerNews :) What I mean is that whilst you guys at Facebook are using PHP you're not usin

I should have expected someone with more knowledge of the system on HackerNews :) What I mean is that whilst you guys at Facebook are using PHP you're not using it in the sense of 'we write code anywhere and deploy it anywhere'. There's an additional build step in between the developers and the final product, rather than just straight up serving PHP as is which is one of the biggest PHP recommendations. Although HipHop is open source so I guess you could still say it's within reach of all developers.

Jach 14y ago
> ... 'we write code anywhere and deploy it anywhere'. There's an additional build step in between the developers and the final product, rather than just straight up serving PHP as is which is one of the biggest PHP recommendations. According to him there's no explicit build step the devs have to perform and they're just writing PHP and using open source packages--meaning they are in fact making use of the "write once run anywhere" ideal at least in some places since the open source packages were made to run on Zend and now they don't. The "write once run anywhere" ideal is kind of a myth anyway since there's always configurations to do, and language-wise was even more of a myth when PHP 5.3 was new. (Some hosts still don't support it, and I'm sure a lot of us remember hosting services who dragged their feet just getting off PHP 4.) It seems like you think the Zend backend is the One True PHP runtime and anything else isn't PHP. This is like saying PyPy isn't Python. It's just a bad argument.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Hm, I possibly need to clarify it up a bit. Now, as far as I understand it the Zend backend takes the PHP code, creates opcodes and executes it in a VM, whereas HipHop takes the code, compiles it down to C++, compiles it again with G++ then runs the resulting C++ binary instead. To me at that stage HipHop is no longer a backend, but an entire build system transforming the language away from PHP. Like I said, I'm not as intimately familiar with the system, but I thought it was along the lines of they have a dynamic system for local development, and when they serve it up it's run through the HipHop compile process.
  - tmzt 14y ago
    I'm still curious why the target is C++ and not LLVM or a direct ISA. AoT seems very useful, using PHP as a language and not a runtime at least in deployment.

Jach 14y ago

> ... 'we write code anywhere and deploy it anywhere'. There's an additional build step in between the developers and the final product, rather than just straight up serving PHP as is which is one of the biggest PHP recommendations. According to him there's no explicit build step the devs have to perform and they're just writing PHP and using open source packages--meaning they are in fact making use of the "write once run anywhere" ideal at least in some places since the open source packages were made to run on Zend and now they don't. The "write once run anywhere" ideal is kind of a myth anyway since there's always configurations to do, and language-wise was even more of a myth when PHP 5.3 was new. (Some hosts still don't support it, and I'm sure a lot of us remember hosting services who dragged their feet just getting off PHP 4.) It seems like you think the Zend backend is the One True PHP runtime and anything else isn't PHP. This is like saying PyPy isn't Python. It's just a bad argument.

nicholassmith 14y ago
Hm, I possibly need to clarify it up a bit. Now, as far as I understand it the Zend backend takes the PHP code, creates opcodes and executes it in a VM, whereas HipHop takes the code, compiles it down to C++, compiles it again with G++ then runs the resulting C++ binary instead. To me at that stage HipHop is no longer a backend, but an entire build system transforming the language away from PHP. Like I said, I'm not as intimately familiar with the system, but I thought it was along the lines of they have a dynamic system for local development, and when they serve it up it's run through the HipHop compile process.
- tmzt 14y ago
  I'm still curious why the target is C++ and not LLVM or a direct ISA. AoT seems very useful, using PHP as a language and not a runtime at least in deployment.