HipHop for PHP: Move Fast
Haiping Zhao,
Facebook,
Feb 02, 2010
This is really interesting. PHP is widely used for social networking applications - it has long served Facebook, and is what is used for things like WordPress and Drupal (among many others). But PHP has a built-in weakness in that it's compiled at run-time; what this means is that there is an extra step before the computer gets data and displays it. This can be mitigated to some degree (quite a bit, actually) with fast-CGI and data caching. But converting PHP to compiled C code removes this weakness altogether. Best of all, Facebook has open-sourced it, meaning that other PHP applications could use it as well. Via Simon Willison.
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