Re:I Like PHP
by tvon on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @01:48PM
(#2869331)
There is little indication that Facebook isn't painful to deal with compared to a functionally identical version of Facebook built in another language/platform. Because someone did it and is profiting from it does not mean they could not have done it better.
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Considering Facebook uses Haskell to automate changes to their PHP codebase, I'd imagine PHP isn't doing them any favors.
I heard about that tool. Can you tell us more about what it does?
Re:I Like PHP
by antoncohen on Thursday August 11, 2011 @03:39AM
(#2871888)
It is called lex-pass [1], it does syntax aware transformations of PHP. Like sed, but specifically for PHP. There is a video that mentions it briefly at 2:00 min [2].
[1] https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass [2] http://www.vimeo.com/6699769
I thought most of Facebook's php is written in a subset of PHP that can HipHop can compile for them. I doubt their PHP is all that similar to eg. Wordpress's PHP.
Re:I Like PHP
by drzaiusapelord on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @02:10PM
(#2869440)
I thought FB's troubles were with mysql not PHP. Turns out mysql has some limiting factors.
Re:I Like PHP
by Pewpewarrows on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @06:54PM
(#2870564)
Turns out * has some limiting factors [when serving 1 trillion page views a month]. Replace "*" with any piece of technology on the web stack.
There's not a single other company in the world (sans probably Google) that has to deal with performance problems on that level of scale. At that point, I can't imagine anything surviving out-of-the-box. Something has to give, even the language they're using (they're using a subset of PHP that they can run through a custom compiler to C++ machine code, to squeeze every possible CPU cycle out of the servers they have).
You can build a Tinker-Toy computer that plays Tic-Tac-Toe, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/1026307...