
HipHop PHP - Nifty Trick?  - pauljonas
http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/53-HipHop-PHP-Nifty-Trick.html
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pauljonas
Rasmus writes:

> The "nifty trick" part of that seems to have become the story, and them
> injecting a "just" in front it of it makes it sound more derogatory. Anyone
> who knows me knows that I am a big fan of nifty tricks that solve the
> problem. When I first heard about the Facebook effort I was assuming they
> were writing a JIT based on LLVM V8 or something along those lines. Writing
> a good JIT is hard. Doing static code analysis and generating compilable C++
> from it is indeed a nifty trick. It's not "just" a nifty trick, it is a cool
> trick that takes advantage of a number of characteristics of PHP. The main
> one being that you can't overload PHP functions. strlen() is always strlen,
> for example. In Python, this would be harder because you can overload
> everything.

> I also noted that most sites on the Web have a lot of lower hanging fruit
> that would provide a much bigger performance improvement, if fixed, than
> doubling the speed of the PHP execution phase. The ReadWriteWeb site, for
> example, needs 160 separate HTTP requests and 41 distinct DNS lookups to
> load the front page. And once you get beyond the frontend inefficiencies you
> usually find Database issues, inefficient system call issues and general
> architecture problems that again aren't solved by speeding up PHP execution.

