Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!

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[–] Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's very rare that the backend language significantly affects performance. In 99% of apps you could have the most optimized backend written directly in machine language, and you'd just shave off milliseconds.

That's because in web development most of the latency comes from i/o (network requests, database access, file access), not from computation being slow.

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

So why did Facebook build that whole system of converting C++ to PHP or whatever they did? Was it because they didn’t understand the savings? Or when you scale that high, the savings really are significant? Were there savings?

Edit to subtract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM is what it eventually turned into, and apparently it showed significant improvements even above the previous system.

[–] blarghly@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Probably because someone said it was a good idea in a meeting.

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There is absolutely no way that’s true lol

[–] blarghly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Its the most true thing you'll read all day.

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

You should look into it. Apparently it was quite a performance increase. I don’t understand all the technical details, but it is very cool to see what large enterprises do at scale.