[GRLUG] sysadmin job opening

[Ben DeMott]

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.
Surely there must be *some* intelligent individuals in the "whole"
engineering department at Facebook.

Results speak -> and Facebook has no Fail Whale. (I'm looking at you
Ruby/JVM)

As for compiled PHP....
Facebook has not yet finished the runtime...
It was leaked from this interview:
http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes

What Facebook currently does is unique... they embed PHP inside of C++
applications and compile them.
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.
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.

Their current application (PHP Embed) is open-source anyone can use it:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=6146092130
http://developers.facebook.com/phpembed/

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org
> wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 10:01 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:
> > Uhmmm,  isn't execution speed and
> > coding speed the usual tradeoff with
> > high level languages?  A shell script
> > can get small things done in a hurry.
> > No one expects it to execute fast.  Or
> > should anyway.
>
> Once upon a time;  these days, for most use-cases, the difference is
> pretty minimal.  But PHP performance in many cases is *BAD*, as in
> terrible, as in minutes vs. seconds.
>
> > Isn't it usually the case that one
> > needs a compiled version of high
> > level code before the speed improves?
> > As in an order of magnitude and more?
>
> No.  It might be true if that 'low-level' code was always optimal, but
> it isn't.  So while maybe true in some theoretical sense this simply is
> not true in reality.
>
> > High level languages keep people
> > from having to learn things like assembly
> > language and "C,"  reduce expensive
> > labor costs, and exploit cheaper, faster
> > hardware, but I'd of thought that it was
> > clear what the price of them is.
> > They are relatively slow. You never get
> > it all.
>
> With current optimizing aot runtimes this is simply no longer true.
>
>
>
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