Facebook Rewrites PHP Runtime For Speed

VonGuard writes "Facebook has gotten fed up with the speed of PHP. The company has been working on a skunkworks project to rewrite the PHP runtime, and on Tuesday of this week, they will be announcing the availability of their new PHP runtime as an open source project. The rumor around this began last week when the Facebook team invited some of the core PHP contributors to their campus to discuss some new open source project. I've written up everything I know about this story on the SD Times Blog."

Comments

Assembler? Really?

[Atmchicago]

Assembly language isn't platform-independent. It's really easy to screw up and hard to optimize. And it's not much faster than C/C++. The issue at hand is balancing the cost of writing the code with the cost of running it. I don't see how the cost of writing and maintaining software in assembly language will ever compete with the costs of C/C++, potential speed increases and all. Object-oriented languages make small performance sacrifices in return for much greater maintenance, and that's how it should be. Scripting languages take this even further, and for these large websites have lost their advantage. The only time assembly will prevail is when we return to incredible memory constraints, but even embedded systems pack tons of memory now so I don't see that being an issue.