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…
Wow that's fast… maybe send the man an e-mail asking what he has been eating. I'll then order it and ship it to Torun :-)
Just kidding, Keep up the good work
Terq, Squark, Pjotr, Michal, Pieter and all the other idealisic folk!
A - S I M P L E - P L A N by ARTiZEN a startingpoint for simple wikidot solutions.
Facebook is not the first to write PHP compiler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadsend_PHP
The problem with Roadsend is that it can't compile Wikidot. And some test apps I compiled that had many includes (like Wikidot) were slower after compiling that when using "the" PHP interpreter. This is because Roadsend really includes the included files even if they are in if (which PHP does not). This makes the binary bigger and thus slower.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
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They didn't write PHP compiler, but only rewrote PHP runtime, BTW.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
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