Wikipedia on HHVM
hhvm.com
Wikipedia on HHVM
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#2Congrats to FB for donating their engineering resources to helping Wikipedia. How do we make this more the norm for large corporations with talent? Something akin to Google's 10% time but with a social-good focus? It might help silicon valley's reputation in a larger sense.
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#3Congrats to FB for donating their engineering resources to helping Wikipedia. How do we make this more the norm for large corporations with talent? Something akin to Google's 10% time but with a social-good focus? It might help silicon valley's reputation in a larger sense.
Bear in mind that Facebook has a vested interest in getting other large sites to use HHVM, so that they're not the only ones who want to maintain it. They're not doing this purely for the greater good.
That said, I agree, Facebook is doing awesome stuff here.
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#4how does HHVM compare to PHP 7 in terms of speed savings? PHP 7 is supposed to be pretty damn fast from what I have seen. I guess benchmarks are hard to read because they're dependent upon a lot of factors. It would be interesting to see two sites at similar scales running competing engines for PHP (hhvm vs. PHP 7).
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#5They note that 5.6 has some substantial performance improvements over 5.3. I'd point out that PHP 7, coming out later this year, will be even faster (perhaps as much as 2x 5.6), since some very smart people have done some big internal refactoring in the Zend engine, largely to reduce allocations, pointer indirection, and memory usage. These efforts combined have resulted in pretty big performance gains, making PHP 7 more competitive with HHVM performance-wise. In addition, writing PHP extensions is somewhat nicer now.
Zeev Suraski (one of the original two Zend Engine authors along with Andi Gutmans, also co-founder of Zend, Inc.) did some benchmarks:
http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng.ht...
http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng-ma...
However, bear in mind that those benchmarks were faked* by Zeev, a Zend Engine proponent. Benchmarks faked* by HHVM engineers might show a larger gap. ;)
* I'm not using "faked" in its normal sense. They probably weren't fraudulent, but I am a believer that we should say "fake a benchmark" and not "make a benchmark" given that they can be so circumstantial and misleading: http://blog.ajf.me/2014-10-23-on-benchmarks
Disclaimer: I am, myself, biased towards the Zend Engine, I'm a php-src committer.
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#6Congrats to FB for donating their engineering resources to helping Wikipedia. How do we make this more the norm for large corporations with talent? Something akin to Google's 10% time but with a social-good focus? It might help silicon valley's reputation in a larger sense.
Bear in mind that Facebook has a vested interest in getting other large sites to use HHVM, so that they're not the only ones who want to maintain it. They're not doing this purely for the greater good. That said, I agree, Facebook is doing awesome stuff here.
> so they're not the only ones who want to maintain it
Being completely unaffiliated with Facebook, I think this still counts as 'greater good' for many.
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bear in mind that Facebook has a vested interest in getting other large sites to use HHVM, so that they're not the only ones who want to maintain it. They're not doing this purely for the greater good. That said, I agree, Facebook is doing awesome stuff here.
> so they're not the only ones who want to maintain it Being completely unaffiliated with Facebook, I think this still counts as 'greater good' for many.
Sure. I'm just saying that they have business motives to do so, it is not merely out of the kindness of their hearts. Though I am sure it is also partly the latter, they have some wonderful engineers. :)
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#8how does HHVM compare to PHP 7 in terms of speed savings? PHP 7 is supposed to be pretty damn fast from what I have seen. I guess benchmarks are hard to read because they're dependent upon a lot of factors. It would be interesting to see two sites at similar scales running competing engines for PHP (hhvm vs. PHP 7).
Minor point of style: We tend to refer to phpng in lowercase, because that's the branch name. Although at this point, since it no longer exists as a branch (it's long since been merged into trunk) and there have been subsequent performance optimisations, the names "PHP 7" or "Zend Engine III" are possibly better.
Also, I partly responded to this above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8848129
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#9They note that 5.6 has some substantial performance improvements over 5.3. I'd point out that PHP 7, coming out later this year, will be even faster (perhaps as much as 2x 5.6), since some very smart people have done some big internal refactoring in the Zend engine, largely to reduce allocations, pointer indirection, and memory usage. These efforts combined have resulted in pretty big performance gains, making PHP 7…
I make a point to say "synthetic benchmarks" for such circumstances. It clearly conveys that the benchmark is contrived, likely to demonstrate a particular point, but it avoids the negative connotations.
Re: Wikipedia on HHVM
#10They note that 5.6 has some substantial performance improvements over 5.3. I'd point out that PHP 7, coming out later this year, will be even faster (perhaps as much as 2x 5.6), since some very smart people have done some big internal refactoring in the Zend engine, largely to reduce allocations, pointer indirection, and memory usage. These efforts combined have resulted in pretty big performance gains, making PHP 7…
I make a point to say "synthetic benchmarks" for such circumstances. It clearly conveys that the benchmark is contrived, likely to demonstrate a particular point, but it avoids the negative connotations.
Ah, that's a good term for it. I like "faked" because it has added humour value (it's rather "ha ha only serious"). Without using a disclaimer around it, though, someone will probably smack me.