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Facebook was running a C++ based PHP interpreter, I'd say that's Web programming in an extreme capacity.

by nicholassmith 13y ago

cgag 13y ago
That sounds like saying assembly is well suited to web programming because Ruby compile down to it eventually.
- CCs 13y ago
  Not exactly. Now about half of the Facebook developers use C++ (the other half PHP)
  - betterunix 13y ago
    Is that the rest of some technical feature or set of features, or just that most college graduates can be expected to have some minimal competency with C++ coupled with the fact that the PHP interpreter was written in C? I am inclined to think this is more a pragmatic decision than a technically motivated one.
    - CCs 13y ago
      It was technically motivated: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-for-php--move-fast/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-... https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/folly-the-facebook-open-source-library/10150864656793920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/folly-th... Edit: From the 1st link "[...] I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage."
      - betterunix 13y ago
        It sounds to me like they wrote a PHP compiler that leverages GCC's optimizer. I am not seeing the technical motivation to use C++ for that; it would have been just as good to just produce GIMPLE. It looks like C++ was just chosen because it is what the developers knew, which is not all that far off from what I said. (Edit: it is also worth pointing out that the motivation for this tool is to avoid having to write C++ code)
kyllo 13y ago
HipHop was originally just a source code converter. It basically took PHP source code and compiled it to C++ code. It's because they wanted to write in PHP but they needed C++ speed. But I don't think that's how it works anymore.

Facebook was running a C++ based PHP interpreter, I'd say that's Web programming in an extreme capacity.

cgag 13y ago

That sounds like saying assembly is well suited to web programming because Ruby compile down to it eventually.

CCs 13y ago
Not exactly. Now about half of the Facebook developers use C++ (the other half PHP)
- betterunix 13y ago
  Is that the rest of some technical feature or set of features, or just that most college graduates can be expected to have some minimal competency with C++ coupled with the fact that the PHP interpreter was written in C? I am inclined to think this is more a pragmatic decision than a technically motivated one.
  - CCs 13y ago
    It was technically motivated: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-for-php--move-fast/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-... https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/folly-the-facebook-open-source-library/10150864656793920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/folly-th... Edit: From the 1st link "[...] I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage."
    - betterunix 13y ago
      It sounds to me like they wrote a PHP compiler that leverages GCC's optimizer. I am not seeing the technical motivation to use C++ for that; it would have been just as good to just produce GIMPLE. It looks like C++ was just chosen because it is what the developers knew, which is not all that far off from what I said. (Edit: it is also worth pointing out that the motivation for this tool is to avoid having to write C++ code)

kyllo 13y ago

HipHop was originally just a source code converter. It basically took PHP source code and compiled it to C++ code. It's because they wanted to write in PHP but they needed C++ speed. But I don't think that's how it works anymore.