I agree they're not a big deal per se, but I do find them clunkier. Facebook seems to agree, and argued that it was worth expending the considerable engineering effort it took to write a whole new PHP runtime, just to avoid the obvious alternative, writing more of Facebook in C++. Though Google does write a lot of its backend stuff in C++ successfully, so culture and what kind of web software you're writing may be part of it.
No, Facebook had LOADS of PHP code thst sas failing terribly. It was easier to write a PHP compiler that a rewrite in C++.However, now they have control of the compiler, they can probably slowly replace the PHP with C++.
