
How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/facebook-hhvm-saga/
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PLenz
I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to
build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.

~~~
fournm
I'm always astounded at just how much effort Facebook puts into trying to keep
PHP usable compared to switching to really almost anything else.

~~~
twic
Porting the site would be a pretty crazy plan. Substantially crazier than
writing your own VM for PHP, which is pretty WTF already.

However, i am really surprised that there doesn't seem to be a plan to
gradually migrate off PHP and on to something decent.

This would involve creating a viable new platform of some sort (Sinatra on
JRuby, Scalatra, Node.js, whatever's cool now), working out how to do the
interoperation with PHP that was necessary (decoding PHP cookies or whatever),
building or porting some minimal feature onto it, getting it into production,
and getting it stable. Further features could then be developed on it or
ported onto it one by one. Establishing this platform should be much less
effort than writing a high-performance PHP VM.

There would remain effort in actually porting bits of the site, but that can
be applied incrementally. New features could be developed on the new platform
at no extra cost.

The new platform would probably be based on the JVM (unless it's Node), and i
would expect it to be faster than HHVM. I would confidently expect it to
require less maintenance. Given that the old platform is PHP, i would also
expect it to be more secure, and to afford better quality code.

My company (a tiny operation in financial services that you've never heard of)
is currently going through something a bit like this. We have a monolithic
legacy app written in Java on a homebrew platform made of servlets, XSLT, and
cheap gin. All our substantial new features are being developed in Scala on
the Play framework. Whilst i'm not certain Scala/Play was the right choice,
the plan is working: we are shipping, we are moving faster when developing the
new features, and we are crying less.

~~~
fournm
This is more what surprises me--the lack of some slow, calculated migration
off of PHP and to something like Node, almost anything JVM based, etc (since
yeah, a full rewrite of any codebase is almost always crazy).

I'm in a similar legacy Java boat at my own work and doing quite a bit of the
"okay, what small piece can we handle" at a time style replacement.

------
snowwrestler
So, who out there in HN land has tried putting their PHP site on top of HHVM?
Was it faster?

