PHP 5.5 Beta Brings New Accelerator

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PHP 5.5 Beta Brings New Accelerator

The first beta of PHP 5.5 was released, which marks the feature freeze for the scripting language. One major feature to PHP 5.5 is the introduction of the Zend Optimizer+ engine...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMzMzg

[wargames]

PHP is

PHP is one of the worst languages ever invented, only on par with Javascript. Thanks god we have sane languages like Java to make our lifes easier

[Luke_Wolf]

PHP is one of the worst languages ever invented, only on par with Javascript. Thanks god we have sane languages like Java to make our lifes easier

Java sane? surely you must be joking. No, thank God we've got sane languages like C++ and C# :P

[newwen]

Java sane? surely you must be joking. No, thank God we've got sane languages like C++ and C# :P

Java is very sane, and very easy to learn.

It lacks some of the features of C#, something that won't be solved until Java 8, but it's a good language and I prefer it over C#. What I miss from java is more low level constructs in order to write more unsafe code, without incurring in the penalty impossed by the JNI.

[Luke_Wolf]

Java is very sane, and very easy to learn.

It lacks some of the features of C#, something that won't be solved until Java 8, but it's a good language and I prefer it over C#. What I miss from java is more low level constructs in order to write more unsafe code, without incurring in the penalty impossed by the JNI.

Pardon but we're going to have to agree to disagree on this point because until Java get's the control freaks kicked out of the language design it's going to continue to be a shit language in my books. Because the whole attitude of "People are going to abuse feature X so we're going to make doing X impossible" pisses me off particularly when it ends up being actually just being an excuse on the part of the language designers to excuse their laziness, resulting in all sorts of braindamaged design that runs completely contrary to any conception of sanity.

C++ and C# have their own issues but at least they're not due to insanity in the form of megalomania.

[TheOne]

HipHop Pressure?

It seems the work been done by facebook developers to create an optimized version of the PHP runtime lead to some good addition to the php software stack. Some competition is always beneficial for end users

One thing I did every time I installed php was to also install the xcache extension, the performance gain can be of 200% - 300%

Still not sure why extensions like xcache were not considered before Is understandable that APC never reached the level of reliability needed by the language but xcache has worked pretty well for me even with newer php versions.

At least we will finally have some decent performance out of the box for php web applications.

[uid313]

Facebook

Why doesn't Facebook contribute anything to PHP? (or do they?)
Aren't any companies contributing anything to PHP? (if they are, then if so then which?)

New accelerator is good, but maybe they should fix the broken stuff?

http://phpsadness.com/

[randomizer]

PHP's problem is not its speed. The language is simply a mess. There is no consistency whatsoever and you can never be sure what a function returns unless you've memorised it (don't try to guess - you'll be wrong). On top of this there are so many online tutorials and formal educational institutions which still teach you to use functions and methods from the dark ages which are relatively slow or totally unsafe if not used carefully (or both), even though there is often a newer method which handles the "carefully" for you. For example, mysql_query().

[moonlitfire]

Why doesn't Facebook contribute anything to PHP? (or do they?)

They sure as heck claim they do.(look at the bottom of the page)

https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

Some notable work they've done in the past has been on APC, some various projects like http://www.phpsh.org/ and hiphop, and they've contributed to XDebug. I really don't know what they contribute back to PHP directly as far as the language goes though.

[balouba]

I saw FB people develop some webuis for their tools and i was impressed by the speed at which they can just make them happen. And I do believe, that it's in part due to PHP.
PHP sucks in a few ways, yes, but it's simple and very straightforward. Heck, often the return stuff is actually taken straight from the C calls.. which makes it pretty easy too.
Even the "object" model is relatively simple.

Other languages, such as python, java, what not, have complex metaphors, frameworks *everywhere* and it's just taking longer to code for, even thus those provide a lot of nice things and consistency. At least, for me. Maybe it's because I started with C. I don't know.