Facebook's PHP compiler

[J65nko]

First it looked like Facebook rewrote the PHP runtime for speed, but it looks like they wrote a PHP compiler.
See http://www.sdtimes.com/blog/post/201...P-runtime.aspx

[J65nko]

More news about this Facebook PHP runtime or compiler at the theregister.co.uk

[J65nko]

The announcement of "HipHop for PHP" from the Facebook website, (my first Facebook visit BTW

http://developers.facebook.com/news....og=1&story=358

HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it.

HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

[TerryP]

I'm not sure a PHP to C++ compiler is an improvement over just writing it in C++ to start with, but I'll take their word for it :-o

[MatthewC]

Originally Posted by TerryP

I'm not sure a PHP to C++ compiler is an improvement over just writing it in C++ to start with, but I'll take their word for it :-o

True, but he started off the post pointing out how simple PHP is to write and debug, and how quickly they can ramp up new developers due to the simplicity of the language. Given the immense volume of traffic that is riding on their systems, I'd assume you'd rather have the new engineers start with a simple language that's hard to mess up and have an experienced engineer write something that will translate it into clean C++, instead of letting the new guy write something that will leave them exposed to some elementary buffer overflow or something of that nature Just my 2 cents.

[MatthewC]

Originally Posted by MatthewC

True, but he started off the post pointing out how simple PHP is to write and debug, and how quickly they can ramp up new developers due to the simplicity of the language. Given the immense volume of traffic that is riding on their systems, I'd assume you'd rather have the new engineers start with a simple language that's hard to mess up and have an experienced engineer write something that will translate it into clean C++, instead of letting the new guy write something that will leave them exposed to some elementary buffer overflow or something of that nature Just my 2 cents.

And yes, I know of PHP's track record of vulnerabilities. There's ways to mess things up that way too, but in my experience the bugs with PHP are generally more straightforward and easier to pick out than with C++, especially in terms of memory management.

[J65nko]

They actually use PHP as a CASE and/or prototyping tool with a fast turn around.

After everything works as desired, they use the HipHop tool to crunch out C++ to satisfy their "need for speed". Makes sense and also saves electricity and carbon emissions

[TerryP]

In my personal experiences PHP is faster to write but can make assembly look more fun to debug.

[Carpetsmoker]

PHP doesn't handle errors very gracefully, personally I prefer the way Python does things by just throwing an exception and exiting whenever something unexpected happens. Which is different from PHP which tried to fix things and run anyway unless it's a really gross error ...

Another thing I dislike about PHP is that it seems to be a rather directionless language. Features and "enhancements" are added almost at random, a prime example is the GOTO feature someone added for PHP6, and then someone else filed a bugreport titled PHP now includes GOTO ...
The response by the PHP devs?

goto hell;

Professional ...

Again, Python does this much better with PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal). Not only does this force people to actually think before they add a feature or module, it also filters out many features that are not particular great ideas to start with, as well as create an atmosphere of positive criticism.

In many ways PHP is like Linux, and Python is like BSD ...

[roddierod]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

In many ways PHP is like Linux, and Python is like BSD ...

Exactly!

10 years ago, I rebuilt our site here from IIS and ASAPI dlls to Apache and PHP.
At the time I didn't know Python and there was all this PHP buzz so I decided to go with it. I took me about 4 or 5 days to learn all the things I need to know in PHP to build a website to interact with a MS SQL database in real time - finding someone talking about connecting to MS SQL at the time was the hardest thing.

I've re-written the site 3 or 4 times and even use PHP frame works to make the code more logical and OO, but despite all that I'm still embarrassed by the code and that is because I've learned Python since then. Python is just so much more organized and logic like FreeBSD! The next iteration of that web site will be in Python which will give Corporate Security a headache, which I love to do!