On Nov 19, 2010 21:20:01, Yoann Padioleau wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2010, at 11:46 AM, Dario Teixeira wrote:
...
> > Actually, Facebook has a compiler that transforms PHP source code into
> > C++ [1], and they claim a 50% reduction in CPU usage.
> 
> Yes, which is good. But if you think about it is "only" a x2 speedup vs a
> really slow bytecode interpreter (the Zend PHP interpreter). PHP is known
> for being more than 30 times slower than C.
> It's even slower than Ruby on
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-fast
> est.php There are lots of opportunities to do better IMHO.

Would it be completely inconceivable for a company like facebook to 
reimplement everything using a fast well designed typed language
instead of "spending hundreds of millions of dollars on machines that run PHP 
bytecode interpreters"? (quoting Yoann)

Vincent [not completely joking]