Facebook Writes PHP Compiler

by pieterh on 31 Jan 2010 16:20

Seems some guy at Facebook has spent two years writing a PHP compiler. Wikidot.com runs on PHP, as you may or may not know. So we'll be looking at this new tool when Facebook releases it, to see whether it does in fact offer us a useful speed-up.

PHP is an interpreted language and this makes it slower than pseudo-compiled languages like Java and .Net. (Which generate a pseudo-code that is still slower than the native code produced by true compiler like like C++.)

We're talking orders of magnitude here (10x or more) but in reality most of the work Wikidot does is cached, or database related, so real improvements would be less than that. In any case, something to look into…

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