Somewhat unrelated, but curious : Does anyone know if Facebook still uses MySQL heavily?
Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
201–210 of 422 posts
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#202Earlier 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…
> What major accomplishments in computing that have been built atop crumbling foundations can claim anything even close to the scale of success of these examples?
Wikipedia and Facebook?
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#203Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#204Is Facebook's code so monolithic that they can't deploy new, decoupled services written in new languages? Twitter did this with Ruby, Java, and Scala. Didn't Facebook create Thrift RFC for exactly this purpose??
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Disclaimer: FB employee.) Do you also argue that C++ is built on top of a crumbling foundation, because it's based on C, a ancient language with almost no type-safety?
Why do you say C has no type safety? Only way around the type system is void , explicit casts and I guess unions. It admittedly doesn't have a very advanced type system, that's true.
> Only way around the type system is void, explicit casts and I guess unions.
And typedefs. Given that there's no parametric types, you run into void* quite frequently as well, so saying "only" inaccurately minimizes the scale of how much C code isn't strictly type safe.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious just what definition you're using for "crumbling foundation". Is it that old software doesn't break on it, in which case PHP/HHVM/Hack isn't a crumbling foundation either - Facebook is built on it, and Facebook is clearly still running. Or is it that maintenance is difficult and programmers will run into all sorts of ugly corner cases and features that are just grafted onto each other? Because those apply…
I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term". Clearly this isn't an absolute scale. As our industry evolves and we develop more reliable ways to achieve our goals, something that we regarded as being a relatively stable foundation in the past may no longer be…
If you define "crumbling foundations" as "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term", then your conclusion is circular. Of course no long-term products will be built on crumbling foundations, because if a technology stack has long-term successes then, by your definition, it is not a crumbling foundation.
I think the other posters are using a definition of "crumbling foundation" as "one which most engineers hate, which slows them down through excess complexity". And by that definition, almost all successful projects are built on crumbling foundations, because the fact that the project was successful leads you to add features to it, and adapt it in ways that the original architecture didn't anticipate. This process only ends when the software becomes so complex that all further attempts at modification fail, at which point everybody hates the codebase and it is, by pretty much any definition, a "crumbling foundation".
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. Yes, because TypeScript is bringing a type-system to a dynamically typed language and so did Hack. No: because Hack is bringing some additional language features affecting the runtime. Modest changes for now, but we intend to carry on in that direction.
Well, it seems Microsoft is doing similarly with Typescript, except instead, waiting for the spec to catch up. I like both ideas.
At least to date, Microsoft stresses the "TypeScript is just JavaScript." New language features are added to ES6 and then wrapped with types in TypeScript.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you say C has no type safety? Only way around the type system is void , explicit casts and I guess unions. It admittedly doesn't have a very advanced type system, that's true.
> Only way around the type system is void, explicit casts and I guess unions. And typedefs. Given that there's no parametric types, you run into void* quite frequently as well, so saying "only" inaccurately minimizes the scale of how much C code isn't strictly type safe.
Right, void* is used quite a lot for "generic" data structures. But I'm not sure that's what he meant. The reason I said "only" was that from my own experience, most C data structures are tailored for a specific use and so I don't see void* too much in this context.
And may I ask why you say "typedef" is unsafe? It is merely a type alias, like e.g. Haskell's and ML's "type", or isn't it?
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#209I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation. I have wondered why FB didn't use a proper language with proper typing to begin with. I mean, I "understand" logistically: they already had a giant codebase in PHP, migrating a codebase is expensive, and it's difficult to hire and train 1000s of hackers in e.g., OCaml. (They do have some OCaml people, but they are outliers. OCaml was my favor…
(Disclaimer: FB employee.) Do you also argue that C++ is built on top of a crumbling foundation, because it's based on C, a ancient language with almost no type-safety?
C++ attempted to fix type safety issues in C.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why use public string $x = ''; instead of public $x:string = ''; It seems inconsistent to me, probably because I've used AS3/Haxe.
Its not just inconsistent with other languages, its consistent with their own language. Property types are declared before the property name, while function return types are declared after (and with a colon). Very strange.
But inconsistency is consistent with PHP's philosophy ;-)