Re:Speeding up PHP with the HipHop VM
by propercoil on Thursday November 29, 2012 @07:36PM
(#4851213)
re-writing the code of any big project is insane. You are going to face those walls you faced in the past - again. Using this logic you would change the whole codebase every few years.. ridiculous
Amazon did it in the 2002/2003 timeframe when they moved from Obidos (C++) to Gurupa (Perl/Mason).
The PHP development environment at Facebook is unlike that found at any other company I'm aware of, and common PHP pitfalls and legacy code are actively "linted" out of the system (as an automated part of the code review process). It still wouldn't be my choice of language to use outside of Facebook, but I have no issue working on the PHP code base here (although I rarely venture into it).
Over time, much logic and processing has been offloaded to backend services, with PHP increasingly playing a (largely parallelised) dispatch, post-process, and render role. That will likely continue.
With all that said, it is questionable whether it would be an investment to move off of it - which language/environment would you think a good target would be, and why?