On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:40 AM C. Scott Ananian <canan...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Fair enough. My point is just that we should stop and reflect that this is > a major inflection point. Language choices are sticky, so this decision > will have significant long-term implications. We should at least stop to > evaluate PHP7 vs Hack and determine which is a better fit for our codebase, > and do due diligence on both sides (count how many engineers, how many open > source contributors, commit rates, etc). HHVM has been flirting with a > LLVM backend, and LLVM itself has quite a large and active community. The > PHP community has had issues with proper handling of security patches in > the past. I'm suggesting to proceed cautiously and have a proper > discussion of all the factors involved instead of over-simplifying this to > "community" vs "facebook". > > I'm not trying to simplify this into community vs. facebook. And let's also be clear: we never chose HHVM for Hack. We don't use Hack. The one experiment I had at trying Hack never panned out. MediaWiki is in PHP, not Hack. The *only* reason we're having a language discussion is because HHVM has announced that they're abandoning PHP in favor of Hack. If someone had some to the list last week and said "Hey let's abandon PHP for XYZLang" they would've been rightly laughed off. The debate here is between runtimes for PHP, and on the long enough timescale there's only one option. PHP has a long-standing history of being a viable runtime. HHVM does not. I don't see this as an A/B choice at all, but rather a clear path forward. So sure: let's have an RfC/TechComm meeting to work out the details, but let's not pretend that option #2 is even remotely viable. It is not. -Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
