Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

Post by FooBarWidget » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 6:49 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #140

lbrandy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation. Because perfect is not the enemy of the good? Because "build atop a crumbling foundation" has demonstrated time and again to be, by far, the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing? Unless you have some example of perfect, now dominant, technologies that have been created ex nihilo that I'm missing? I mean we (facebook) are…

Because "build atop a crumbling foundation" has demonstrated time and again to be, by far, the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing? I can't imagine where that sort of conclusion comes from. Building on a crumbling foundation seems to be just about the most proven, reliable way to ensure your software project won't survive more than a short time without needing serious effort just to maintain it an…

Post by pekk » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 6:50 PM UTC

dscrd wrote: post #170

lbrandy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is a "crumbling foundation" in exactly the same way DOS, Windows, COBOL, and C and C++ were, are, "crumbling foundations". I don't see how you are disagreeing with me. You are proving the point. You aren't actually going to claim that Windows was well-conceived and theoretically well-founded, are you? Windows has been a never ending refinement on exceptionally shaky ground.

I'm appalled and little bit insulted that you group PHP in the same group with COBOL, C and C++ in terms of their foundation. COBOL and C were designed by some of the greatest pioneers of the field, and indeed PHP is built on C.

Post by elgenie » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 6:54 PM UTC

valarauca1 wrote: post #163

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

With Async functions I'm not sure if the documentation is lacking or I'm just slightly thick, I believe the later. (I'm not a php developer so excuse my ignorance) It seems you only have 1 method 'await', to check if the async function has completed its job (it self, if I'm understanding is a blocking operation in which ever thread/worker its called). So is there a way to run something more similar to $i = 1; while(d…

  async function gen_foo(): Awaitable {
    echo "until we get to an await, eager execution\n";
    // ...
    await gen_bar();
    // this code is only executed after await
    return 'result';
  }
  $x = gen_foo(); // x is a handle, suspended at the point of its first 'await'
  await $x; // ... and now it's resumed
  

  list($x, $y, $z) = await genva(
    gen_foo(), 
    gen_bar(),
    gen_baz();
  ); // genva creates a wait handle for awaiting its args

  // ... and when we get here $x, $y, and $z are all assigned

Post by jwatzman » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 6:56 PM UTC

fzltrp wrote: post #130

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

Great work! A question about the type inference mechanism: in PHP, while it is possible to define object interfaces which classes may be defined against, by the dynamic nature of the language, functions don't necessarily need that interface specification to accept an object conforming to it, explicitely or implicitely. OCaml provides something "similar" with its object system, but much more powerful with static infer…

  g();
  }
  f(new C());

Post by camus2 » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

rabino wrote: post #179

camus2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish these extensions came by way of the PHP core Well where is PHP core then? to my knowledge while PHP 5 was a huge step forward, PHP core did little to fix PHP stupid design flaws,for the sake of backward compatibility. We are in a new era, libraries are more and more decoupled,so they are easy to write or rewrite,backward compatibily shouldnt be an issue when libraries are well versioned and tested across dif…

Can you expand on "Wordpress folks dont care about PHP.next" ?