Re:Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection
by eru on Sunday November 03, 2024 @05:42AM
(#42032312)
Well, Facebook also created their own hacked up version of PHP (called Hack) that's presumably easier to migrate PHP to.
Hack is actually surprisingly pleasant, basically about the best language they could have made starting from PHP. (I know, that's damning with faint praise. But I actually mean this unironically. It has TypeScript vibes.)
Re:Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection
by krapp on Sunday November 03, 2024 @05:51AM
(#42032348)
I was excited about Hack when it came out. Unfortunately PHP took just enough from it to kill it. I gave up on it once Composer stopped supporting it, after backwards compatibility with PHP no longer became a goal.
IMHO Hack's best feature was native support for XHP... which (also unfortunately) isn't something PHP decided to take.
Re:Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection
by eru on Sunday November 03, 2024 @05:56AM
(#42032356)
I only used Hack when I was very briefly working for Facebook. (And I used PHP once before nearly 20 years ago by now for some web site I had 'inherited', back when PHP was truly an awful language)
Re:Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection
by Twirrim on Sunday November 03, 2024 @01:24PM
(#42034943)
Hack really gave PHP/Zend the kick up the arse that it seemed to need.
Instagram is presumably in the same position. Switching language is basically impossible once you have a certain amount of code. I'm sure they were aware of the performance issues with Python but they probably said "we'll worry about it later" when they were a small startup and now it's too late.