Things you should know about PHP 7 • Hacker News Board

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#121

Post by itafroma » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 4:06 AM UTC

imakesnowflakes wrote: post #117

itafroma wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe there seem to be some alternatives? This is not meant to be an endorsement of this method, but PHP Like a lot of extant PHP, there's no real reason it was done this way: it's just the method Rasmus et al happened to program the original engine, and it's grown organically since then. With the AST, phpng, and the uniform variable syntax, I'd argue PHP7's main feature is finally getting around to correcting the…

>A lot of the buggy and quirky behavior PHP exhibits (at least when that behavior is unintentional) is the result of this process. A lot? Please stop spreading wrong info. In the words of an internal developer, > It does fix a few minor points with regard to variables vs. expressions, but those aren't particularly important. >"So, really, the whole thing has no direct effect on userland devs. It's an internal rewrite…

> A lot? Please stop spreading wrong info. In the words of an internal developer,

You may disagree with me saying "a lot", and that's fair, but I don't think it's fair to say it's "wrong info" and NikiC's characterization that it has "no direct effect on userland devs" is disingenuous, given the RFC lists several changes to syntax and behavior: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/abstract_syntax_tree#changes_to_syn...

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#122

Post by bovermyer » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 5:39 AM UTC

jtreminio wrote: post #98

bovermyer wrote: post #95

Between PHP 7 and HHVM, and what appears to me to be an increasingly fragmented community, I decided to jump ship to Ruby on Rails as my development platform of choice for web apps. This is not to say that PHP won't work fine for many people; I just don't care for the (several) directions PHP is going in.

Not sure what you mean. I have not detected any fragmentation. In fact, HHVM's speed of development has been a much needed kick in the pants to PHP.

The introduction of a language specification by Facebook is great.

The fact that it took over a decade for a language specification to appear is less so.

PHP-NG/PHP 7's troubled birth, and its contention with HHVM, does not bode well for PHP's future. I feel like it's going the route of Perl 5/6;Python 2/3.

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#123

Post by chupy » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 7:07 AM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #78

implicit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hack is also a substantially better language than PHP. It, directly or indirectly, fixes a lot of horrible behaviour. PHP's absurd comparison operators, for instance, are safely usable once you drop them into a statically typed environment.

Hack is merely PHP with poorly-enforced type hints Unlike PHP, Hack lets you, nay, encourages you, to turn off type checking in places

I don't believe it's just that. One of the coolest features which if it is used properly actually speeds up the response times of a normal blocking php script /app flow is the as async feature: http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.async.php.

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#124

Post by fijal » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 8:12 AM UTC

arthursilva wrote: post #113

fijal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ujson breaks the spec btw ;-) We tried doing the same thing but cffi callbacks are slow. We should maybe revisit that (and make callbacks faster, we did get better on that)

Ya, it's limited indeed. I just realized you're a pypy developer. Thanks for all the good work you guys are putting on it!

To be fair, if json being 50% slower means your whole program is slower, even if other parts are faster, generally means that your bottlenecks are in serializing/unserializing and not in the VM, so we have really nothing to work with here :-)