What you are saying disagrees with the conclusions that Facebook as a whole has reached with regard to efficiency and lower vs higher-level programming.<br>Surely there must be *some* intelligent individuals in the "whole" engineering department at Facebook.<br>
<br>Results speak -> and Facebook has no Fail Whale. (I'm looking at you Ruby/JVM)<br><br>As for compiled PHP....<br>Facebook has not yet finished the runtime...<br>
It was leaked from this interview:<br>
<a href="http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes">http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes</a><br>
<br>
What Facebook currently does is unique... they embed PHP inside of C++ applications and compile them.<br>
The PHP source doesn't get "Compiled" like the C++ source does - it
uses a modified sapi to compile portions of the PHP source as
functions.<br>
The C++ application treats places it encounters PHP as linked-libraries
in memory... At this point everything is a series of opcodes and walla
- os, and processor instructions are executed.<br>
<br>
Their current application (PHP Embed) is open-source anyone can use it:<br>
<a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=6146092130">http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=6146092130</a><br>
<a href="http://developers.facebook.com/phpembed/">http://developers.facebook.com/phpembed/</a><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Adam Tauno Williams <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:awilliam@whitemice.org">awilliam@whitemice.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 10:01 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:<br>
> Uhmmm, isn't execution speed and<br>
> coding speed the usual tradeoff with<br>
> high level languages? A shell script<br>
> can get small things done in a hurry.<br>
> No one expects it to execute fast. Or<br>
> should anyway.<br>
<br>
</div>Once upon a time; these days, for most use-cases, the difference is<br>
pretty minimal. But PHP performance in many cases is *BAD*, as in<br>
terrible, as in minutes vs. seconds.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Isn't it usually the case that one<br>
> needs a compiled version of high<br>
> level code before the speed improves?<br>
> As in an order of magnitude and more?<br>
<br>
</div>No. It might be true if that 'low-level' code was always optimal, but<br>
it isn't. So while maybe true in some theoretical sense this simply is<br>
not true in reality.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> High level languages keep people<br>
> from having to learn things like assembly<br>
> language and "C," reduce expensive<br>
> labor costs, and exploit cheaper, faster<br>
> hardware, but I'd of thought that it was<br>
> clear what the price of them is.<br>
> They are relatively slow. You never get<br>
> it all.<br>
<br>
</div>With current optimizing aot runtimes this is simply no longer true.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
grlug mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:grlug@grlug.org">grlug@grlug.org</a><br>
<a href="http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug" target="_blank">http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>