You are essentially right but your description implies Facebook is now
programmed in C, which I is inaccurate. Based on what I read, the C code
generated is not maintained. It is simply an intermediate step that is
used to create a compiled binary. PHP code is the only thing modified and
maintained by Facebook engineers. Think EGL. It generates the Java or
Cobol code but you (are supposed to) only maintain the EGL code. So this
all happens seamlessly with little to no PHP code modification (They admit
eval doesn't work- but that is avoided by most PHP programmers).
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|Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> |
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|Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx> |
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| Date: |
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|02/09/2010 10:49 AM |
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|Re: [WEB400] HipHop for PHP |
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From: Aaron Bartell
I would say that FaceBook couldn't run on the PHP of 6
years ago without having an incredibly huge server farm.
The facilitator at the conference where HipHop was presented indicated that
FaceBook had "tens of thousands of web servers". It was an off the cuff
remark. Did anyone else catch that?
It's actually not clear to me what HipHop is. It sounded like they
transformed their PHP code into C, and compiled it. And rewrote the PHP
runtime engine to evoke it. So that Facebook is essentially a C
application. Is that right?
-Nathan.
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