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[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
(nophpunintended.com)
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!
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.
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.
Probably because someone said it was a good idea in a meeting.
There is absolutely no way that’s true lol
Its the most true thing you'll read all day.
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.