On Nov 20, 2010, at 7:42 AM, Benedikt Meurer wrote: > > On Nov 20, 2010, at 16:19 , Vincent Balat wrote: > >> On Nov 19, 2010 21:20:01, Yoann Padioleau wrote: >>> On Nov 19, 2010, at 11:46 AM, Dario Teixeira wrote: >> ... >>>> Actually, Facebook has a compiler that transforms PHP source code into >>>> C++ [1], and they claim a 50% reduction in CPU usage. >>> >>> Yes, which is good. But if you think about it is "only" a x2 speedup vs a >>> really slow bytecode interpreter (the Zend PHP interpreter). PHP is known >>> for being more than 30 times slower than C. >>> It's even slower than Ruby on >>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-fast >>> est.php There are lots of opportunities to do better IMHO. >> >> Would it be completely inconceivable for a company like facebook to >> reimplement everything using a fast well designed typed language
I think it is inconceivable. I doubt facebook will switch to ocaml and ocsigen tomorrow :) The problem is how to migrate code to another language smoothly ? You can not stop all development for a month and say "Hey everybody, we are porting our 10 millions lines of code of PHP to X.". The reason C++ succeeded was because there was a smooth migration path. C code is valid C++ code. You can incrementally add objects to an existing codebase. Do we have example of big companies porting their whole codebase to another language ? >> instead of "spending hundreds of millions of dollars on machines that run >> PHP >> bytecode interpreters"? (quoting Yoann) Apparently they decided to keep PHP and switch from a slow bytecode interpreter to a 2x-faster compiler. > > It's probably not a technical decision, but more likely a marketing decision. > If you tell Joe Who is Joe ? A developer ? A user ? A venture capitalist ? > that your webservices run on Java, PHP or .NET, he'll say "great", "sure" or > "wow" (not because Joe's familiar with the technology or the theory, but > because he's familiar with the terms). Tell Joe your webservices run on OCaml > or Haskell and the best answer you can get will be "what?". I doubt any user care about how facebook is implemented. Twitter and Foursquare run on Scala and this is not a very popular language. > >> Vincent [not completely joking] > > Benedikt > _______________________________________________ > Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: > http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list > Archives: http://caml.inria.fr > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
