I didn't mean to imply that Facebook is programmed in C - sorry about that. I gathered that they used both PHP developers, and C developers. The former would develop and test new functionality, while the latter would transform the PHP into C as part of the process of moving it into production. It wasn't clear to me how automated the transformation process was.
So that begs the question, will Facebook become a supplier of transformation and runtime tools for PHP?
-Nathan.
----- Original Message ----
From: "MattLavinder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <MattLavinder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tue, February 9, 2010 9:29:02 AM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] HipHop for PHP
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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|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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