Re:Ending PHP Support, and the Future of Hack
by smsm42 on Thursday September 13, 2018 @01:00AM
(#17976185)
> why didn't FB just spend that energy submitting a patch to make PHP faster?
Several reasons. First, it's not that easy. It took years of work by some very smart people to get the jump from PHP 5 to PHP 7, and Facebook needed the performance much earlier that this way could deliver (and it wasn't at all certain that it would deliver at all). Second, Facebook needed their own language anyway to be able to add stuff they - with their particular use case, which is dissimilar to the use case of the vast majority of PHP users - need and for the model they use to run servers and operations. So for Facebook having something that both delivers performance that they need and is under their total control and can be made to do exactly what they need it to do makes a lot of sense.
> Now I also don't know if I buy that MAX_INT + 1 and pass-by-reference is a pressing enough use case to break compatibility.
It's not about that, that part is small change. The point is they don't want to be restrained by what PHP does, but want to have their own way with HHVM. Which is very understandable, they have their needs and they found a way to support them. Of course, for the open source community might be better if Facebook continued to support PHP - but if for Facebook it makes more sense to do their own thing without worrying about being compatible with PHP, then that's what they should do.
Several reasons. First, it's not that easy. It took years of work by some very smart people to get the jump from PHP 5 to PHP 7, and Facebook needed the performance much earlier that this way could deliver (and it wasn't at all certain that it would deliver at all). Second, Facebook needed their own language anyway to be able to add stuff they - with their particular use case, which is dissimilar to the use case of the vast majority of PHP users - need and for the model they use to run servers and operations. So for Facebook having something that both delivers performance that they need and is under their total control and can be made to do exactly what they need it to do makes a lot of sense.
> Now I also don't know if I buy that MAX_INT + 1 and pass-by-reference is a pressing enough use case to break compatibility.
It's not about that, that part is small change. The point is they don't want to be restrained by what PHP does, but want to have their own way with HHVM. Which is very understandable, they have their needs and they found a way to support them. Of course, for the open source community might be better if Facebook continued to support PHP - but if for Facebook it makes more sense to do their own thing without worrying about being compatible with PHP, then that's what they should do.