4 ms·

Love the work, but honestly by the time PHP 5.7 is ready for mainstream (with extension support mysqli, memcache, mongo), Facebook HHVM will be the defacto stan

Love the work, but honestly by the time PHP 5.7 is ready for mainstream (with extension support mysqli, memcache, mongo), Facebook HHVM will be the defacto standard. FB has a huge head start and can throw nearly unlimited money and engineering hours at the problem. Seems like a losing battle, but perhaps I am wrong.

batmansbelt 12y ago
No one ever says that the different python implementations are fighting a losing battle. People generally seem to say that having multiple implementations is good for the language.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  When there is only one, people tend to confuse implementation with language. Additionally there is also a way to sort out possible bugs in language specification, as differences across implementations are sorted out.
NameNickHN 12y ago
PHP's success is the result of PHP being available at even the tiniest webhost. I don't see that happen for FaceBook HHVM, though. FaceBook HHVM performance results will spur on Zend's efforts in making the PHP engine faster, though.
- jack9 12y ago
  > PHP's success is the result of PHP being available at even the tiniest webhost. I don't think so. PHP was the most performant (when paired with MySQL) and the simplest environment/language to develop with, for the time (late 90s onward). Projects grew and money was made off of functional sites that scaled to the critical mass. It was common to hire highly skilled developers for optimizing parts of a site that had been originally done in PHP. If PHP only interacted with Oracle or had been relatively slow as an Apache module, it would never have been popularized. Period. Java, C, Perl, LISP, etc were simply left behind with convoluted setups and ridiculously difficult syntax for the simplest of tasks (java was particularly immature). Later, webhosts appeared and PHP was trivial to integrate (as it had always been). In the late 90's the cheapest webhost was about $5 a month (thread.net - with a waiting list) By 2000, Yahoo had done a proper assessment and moved over straightforward development to PHP (still using oracle though). It's interesting to see so many languages fail to adopt the obvious characteristics that made/make PHP popular. PHP has started to stumble away from those same characteristics in the pursuit of specific agendas by framework developers and language contributors (PSRs are a myopic farce). Performance, ease of deployment....who else has this? Oh yeah, Javascript. Never mind how horrid that language is, it matched PHP for ubiquity (thx to apple and other vendors standardizing and implementing so <noscript> has gone away for the most part). HVVM is more performant (for any non-trivial code). Will this be enough to give it superior momentum? Probably...until PHP finally just adopts it. Java's VM sucked and you wanted to always be using JRockit VMs 4 years ago. Eventually Oracle simply integrated them together. I see that as the eventual end here.
beaumartinez 12y ago
It's Facebook, not FaceBook. Spelling it like that makes reading it jarring.
- whatts 12y ago
  90% of people write DropBox, as well ;)
  - fdsary 12y ago
    Only PhP PeoPle
smsm42 12y ago
Not likely. HHVM is Facebook's private implementation and it would require a lot of time for it to be anywhere near wide acceptance, let alone "de facto standard". >>> an throw nearly unlimited money and engineering hours at the problem They can, but they won't. Because it already works for them, so the amount of resources they are willing to commit to something that no longer gives any upside to them will be limited. >>> Seems like a losing battle, but perhaps I am wrong. There's no battle and this is not a zero sum game. HHVM will have its market and standard PHP engine will have its market.

batmansbelt 12y ago

No one ever says that the different python implementations are fighting a losing battle. People generally seem to say that having multiple implementations is good for the language.

pjmlp 12y ago
When there is only one, people tend to confuse implementation with language. Additionally there is also a way to sort out possible bugs in language specification, as differences across implementations are sorted out.

NameNickHN 12y ago

PHP's success is the result of PHP being available at even the tiniest webhost. I don't see that happen for FaceBook HHVM, though. FaceBook HHVM performance results will spur on Zend's efforts in making the PHP engine faster, though.

jack9 12y ago
> PHP's success is the result of PHP being available at even the tiniest webhost. I don't think so. PHP was the most performant (when paired with MySQL) and the simplest environment/language to develop with, for the time (late 90s onward). Projects grew and money was made off of functional sites that scaled to the critical mass. It was common to hire highly skilled developers for optimizing parts of a site that had been originally done in PHP. If PHP only interacted with Oracle or had been relatively slow as an Apache module, it would never have been popularized. Period. Java, C, Perl, LISP, etc were simply left behind with convoluted setups and ridiculously difficult syntax for the simplest of tasks (java was particularly immature). Later, webhosts appeared and PHP was trivial to integrate (as it had always been). In the late 90's the cheapest webhost was about $5 a month (thread.net - with a waiting list) By 2000, Yahoo had done a proper assessment and moved over straightforward development to PHP (still using oracle though). It's interesting to see so many languages fail to adopt the obvious characteristics that made/make PHP popular. PHP has started to stumble away from those same characteristics in the pursuit of specific agendas by framework developers and language contributors (PSRs are a myopic farce). Performance, ease of deployment....who else has this? Oh yeah, Javascript. Never mind how horrid that language is, it matched PHP for ubiquity (thx to apple and other vendors standardizing and implementing so <noscript> has gone away for the most part). HVVM is more performant (for any non-trivial code). Will this be enough to give it superior momentum? Probably...until PHP finally just adopts it. Java's VM sucked and you wanted to always be using JRockit VMs 4 years ago. Eventually Oracle simply integrated them together. I see that as the eventual end here.

beaumartinez 12y ago

It's Facebook, not FaceBook. Spelling it like that makes reading it jarring.

whatts 12y ago
90% of people write DropBox, as well ;)
- fdsary 12y ago
  Only PhP PeoPle

smsm42 12y ago

Not likely. HHVM is Facebook's private implementation and it would require a lot of time for it to be anywhere near wide acceptance, let alone "de facto standard". >>> an throw nearly unlimited money and engineering hours at the problem They can, but they won't. Because it already works for them, so the amount of resources they are willing to commit to something that no longer gives any upside to them will be limited. >>> Seems like a losing battle, but perhaps I am wrong. There's no battle and this is not a zero sum game. HHVM will have its market and standard PHP engine will have its market.