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Wikipedia on HHVM

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Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#42
The results would have been very interesting if they switched from PHP 5.6, but switching from 5.3 to HHVM is impossible to know how much of the improvements are due to the newer PHP and how much to HHVM. Nevertheless, Wikimedia must be really satisfied.

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#43
post #2

Congrats 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.

I think a better example would be Btrfs. Facebook hired the lead Btrfs devs and they are still contributing to Btrfs development. And this is because Facebook is very interested in Btrfs themselves.

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

As far as I'm aware, HHVM isn't something that FB is charging for. If that's true, what's the business interest?

Um, this is literally the open source process. This is how it's supposed to work.

http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same one I mentioned before: getting other people to use it benefits them, as other people will help maintain it because they also have a stakehold in its success. It's a huge project to maintain.

If you define it that way then there's almost nothing in the world that would categorize as altruism. Helping kids in Africa? It's only to make yourself feel good. Helping that fallen granny get up? It's to make yourself look good in front of others. Etc. If you go that far, both egoism and altruism will have completely lost their meanings.

>Helping kids in Africa? It's only to make yourself feel good. Helping that fallen granny get up? It's to make yourself look good in front of others.

Exactly! Of course we do things to make ourselves feel good. And since helping other people makes us feel good, why shouldn't we be honest about our motives? It's win-win.

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#46

They 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 think that techempower is a neutral third party yet they show php having a huge advantage over hhvm[1]

[1] : https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#47
post #46

They 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 think that techempower is a neutral third party yet they show php having a huge advantage over hhvm[1] [1] : https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

That's JSON serialisation, it may just be that HHVM has a faster JSON library.

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other business interest is... as it gets more adopted, more people will know the ins and outs, and the talent pool for them to pick from will grow. More other businesses using it also makes it harder for people to make the argument against it as "it's just a Facebook thing"

Yes. It's probably hard to hire developers if they must program in an obscure internal-only dialect of PHP (Hack).

That comment got downvoted to -1! I'm not saying Hack is obscure and used only by Facebook - but it would have been had Facebook not open-sourced HHVM and tried to promote its use.

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#49

They 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…

hhvm is still far faster and generally uses less memory. The development pace is also much faster. Zend is on the outs, and that's a good thing.

Re: Wikipedia on HHVM

#50

how 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).

I have seen anywhere from 100% to 50% faster, with lower memory usage overall.
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