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Facebook's HipHop Also a PHP Webserver
darthcamaro writes "As expected, Facebook today announced a new runtime for PHP, called HipHop. What wasn't expected were a few key revelations disclosed today by Facebook developer David Recordan. As it turns out, Facebook has been running HipHop for months and it now powers 90 percent of their servers — it's not a skunkworks project; it's a Live production technology. It's also not just a runtime, it's also a new webserver. 'In general, Apache is a great Web server, but when we were looking at how we get the next half percent or percent of performance, we didn't need all the features that Apache offers," Recordon said. He added, however, that he hopes an open source project will one day emerge around making HipHop work with Apache Web servers.'"
Seriously, why would anyone use PHP to develop non-web apps, when there are so many significantly better alternatives?
Python, Perl and Ruby are the big three alternatives that run on more platforms than PHP, offer much better and more mature languages, and have far better standard libraries. Haskell and Erlang are much better functional equivalents.
Even then, we still have Tcl, C, C++, Java, C#, and many other languages available to use.
PHP isn't really that useful for web development any more. The only reason it still hangs on is because so many companies and individuals screwed up and chose to use it in the first place.
*learns PHP as a new hire at Facebook*
"Look, ma, I'm an engineer!"
*writes shitty php code*
"Look, ma, I'm innovating!"
The number of people who chose PHP because it has a superficial syntactic resemblance to C (actually it looks more like Perl than C) must be vanishingly small.
No one(*) develops in C any more, being C-like is no longer a benefit.
(*) Ok, I know that _some people_ do - I do myself, for a job even, but it's very rare to find new developers that know real C, compared with Java, C# or C++. And the number of people who profess some level of PHP proficiency dwarf all of them.
Advanced users are users too!
> An experienced C++ programmer rarely creates memory leaks,
An INEXPERIENCED java programmer NEVER creates memory leaks,
An experienced java programmer could manage to create memory leaks using threads but you almost have to do this on purpose ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.