How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
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Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#2I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#3I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
Why is that?
I don't know a lot about re-writing a code base in a different language, but I doubt the time/effort required for the re-write is the only consideration. You're not just replacing the source, you're replacing the entire development process. Tools, processes, talent, stack.
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#4I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
You know how users scream when Facebook changes anything about the behaviour? Imagine the screaming when they change lots of little behaviours, all at once.
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#5I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
At Facebook we don't believe in memos, we just push to production. It's hacker culture.
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#6So, who out there in HN land has tried putting their PHP site on top of HHVM? Was it faster?
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#7I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
I'm always astounded at just how much effort Facebook puts into trying to keep PHP usable compared to switching to really almost anything else.
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#8I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
Hey, I'm Keith and am one of the subjects of the story.
HHVM is a much, much smaller undertaking than rebuilding Facebook from scratch. Wired did another article from the same source interviews about just how big Facebook is these days: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/facebook-window...
Building HHVM was a fraction of the effort, and did not require that we sit on our hands while the competition beat us up during a rewrite.
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#9I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
I'm always astounded at just how much effort Facebook puts into trying to keep PHP usable compared to switching to really almost anything else.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Is a pretty good explanation of why we don't rewrite the whole site. A rewrite would involve every product dev stopping what they are doing and probably spending at least 18 months reimplementing their product in a different language. During that time all forward progress on products would be halted. I am absolutely certain it would be an unmitigated disaster for the company to try to rewrite the site in another language.
Instead we have a small team of people making PHP really nice work work in. HipHop gives us full control over the language and lets us add in any constructs we like. We make sure stock PHP runs, but also the additions we need to the language can be added as well.
I don't really understand devs who think reimplementing in another language is easy or the right thing to do. It's almost always the wrong thing from my experience and always lot harder and takes a lot longer than expected.
Re: How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook
#10I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.
I'm always astounded at just how much effort Facebook puts into trying to keep PHP usable compared to switching to really almost anything else.
I'm sure it has to do with a perception of 'sunk cost.' Everyone there knows PHP. They've developed tons of PHP libraries. They've set up their servers to run PHP. They have probably also ported some of the more complex code to PHP extensions.
They probably should've moved to a different language a while back, but those kinds of changes require a lot of effort that don't seem economically expedient at the time.