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by betterunix 4738 days ago
Is that the rest of some technical feature or set of features, or just that most college graduates can be expected to have some minimal competency with C++ coupled with the fact that the PHP interpreter was written in C? I am inclined to think this is more a pragmatic decision than a technically motivated one.
1 comments
CCs 4738 days ago
It was technically motivated:

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-...

https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/folly-th...

Edit: From the 1st link

"[...] I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage."

link
betterunix 4738 days ago
It sounds to me like they wrote a PHP compiler that leverages GCC's optimizer. I am not seeing the technical motivation to use C++ for that; it would have been just as good to just produce GIMPLE. It looks like C++ was just chosen because it is what the developers knew, which is not all that far off from what I said.

(Edit: it is also worth pointing out that the motivation for this tool is to avoid having to write C++ code)

link