Facebook Releases JIT PHP Compiler

angry tapir writes, quoting a Techworld article: "In its continuing endeavor to serve its 800 million users as quickly as possible, Facebook is once again revamping the way it handles its PHP-based Web pages. Facebook has posted ... its HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), which the company's engineers call a just-in-time PHP compiler. According to Facebook, this PHP execution engine is 60 percent faster than its current PHP interpreter and uses 90 percent less memory." Facebook has a weblog post with a more technical description.

Comments

Re:Mixed feelings

[yelvington]

That's a step forward for us who rely on crammed share hosting providers, but I strongly believe that PHP has to be phased out in favor of more recent techologies that enforce a clearer (eg DRY, separation of content and logic etc) way of thinking.

Programming languages don't create programming messes. People do.

Is it open sourced?

[Taco Cowboy]

Is FB's JIT PHP open sourced?

Re:Mixed feelings

[vinng86]

You must be knew to programming. PHP is a language, not a framework. You can use a PHP framework to apply a MVC (model/view/controller) structure or you can choose not to. It's entirely up to the programmer, not the language.

Re:Mixed feelings

[John Courtland]

Bullshit. PHP's standard library is a piece of shit that certainly promotes bad coding practices. Case in point: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.implode.php

And I quote:

implode() can, for historical reasons, accept its parameters in either order. For consistency with explode(), however, it may be less confusing to use the documented order of arguments.

Re:Mixed feelings

[InsightIn140Bytes]

No it doesn't. It's entirely up to you how you use an programming language. It's good that PHP supports "mixed mode" and everything between. Hell, I've made IRC server with PHP along with desktop apps and everything else.

Re:So True.

[Jack9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

Re:Mixed feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah cause PHP is so bad Facebook use it... no programming language is perfect, they all have their quirks. But your comment is baseless, PHP doesn't make bad programmers, it just doesn't break your legs if you are one.

Re:Mixed feelings

[InsightIn140Bytes]

You are a disgusting filth and I will loath the existence of people who don't use the right tool for the right job for the rest of my life.

You know, people who do fancy stuff with not exactly the right tools were called "hackers".

Re:Mixed feelings

[MightyMartian]

Which means it won't be. PHP has taken hold, and good, bad or ugly, we're stuck with it. There's no phasing it in anything like the short or even medium term. LAMP is everywhere, and countless sites are built on it. It's like COBOL, a bad dream that will keep terrifying us even as better languages flicker and die.

Re:Mixed feelings

[garyebickford]

Ya know, about 30 years ago, that statement could have been written thusly:

C programs are per se incompatible with the structured programming model. It's a bad programming practice and if you use it, you are doomed to repeat yourself.

Your statement is pretty much equivalent to "never end a sentence with a preposition".

Structured programming eventually failed to take over the world because it imposed too much artificial, restrictive structure. Back then I remarked that "structured programming" was merely a way to force all programs to fit on a flat two-dimensional surface with no crossing lines. Admittedly, such programs are easier to analyze, but are a tiny, tiny subset of the set of interesting and useful programs. For example, one can look at the entire internet as one rather large, complex, multithreaded program.

MVC is a good model, but it ain't the be-all and end-all. All models are an attempt to impose an rational order on what is essentially a linguistic medium (with a veneer of logic). The languages that survive are those that allow the maximum flexibility, with enough support for the tools of analysis and good practice to allow programmers to succeed. C, for example, continues to succeed because it does not have such artificial constraints, but can be adapted to the constraints that the programmer (and the organization) considers important at the time. As a counterexample, see Pascal, or Algol. And don't forget Gõdel.

So, use MVC and DRY. But one day you will find a situation where they get in the way of the most elegant solution. Or, more likely, they will get in the way of hacking a new feature into some legacy POS in time to meet the deadline that Marketing already promised to the client! :D

Re:Mixed feelings

[mcrbids]

Certain, I'm going to get modded to oblivion for this, but....

Brother I hear your music! PHP is highly underrated! It's a language flexible enough to allow you to just stick a date stamp in the middle of a random webpage, and also write a highly complex, object-oriented application framework with gorgeous abstractions.

Performance is decent, sources are open and don't require compiling, and it's compatible with every webhost and platform out there. It scales well with it's "share nothing" approach, and is one of the most stable software packages I've ever seen. Oh, and the Documentation is excellent.

Sure, it has it's warts: dynamic typing means that in the right contexts, 1==0, and a few others, but these are edge cases in every situation that matters. Most of the problems with OOP in PHP4 have been fixed with the now-almost-universal PHP5.

I can do c, c++, Python, Perl, Javascript, Java, etc. but PHP is my favorite as the Chrysler K-car that doesn't win any looks contests, but always starts and gets you where you want to go, even if only at the legal speed limit.