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by smt88 4134 days ago
Zend now has a much larger, better-funded competitor with better engineers -- Facebook. I agree that it was a bad thing that Zend was trying to dominate the PHP community, but there's no longer a monopoly.
1 comments

Facebook doesn't touch the original PHP interpreter.
In a language where the rules are defined by what one implementation does, once an alternative implementation has the necessary critical mass, that becomes the language.

So I guess HipHop will simply leapfrog them.

If I remember correctly, Facebook was submitting PHP patches for a long time, especially when they concerned security.

And once there's 100% parity between HHVM and Zend's interpreter, why would I, as a user, care whether the competitors are working on the same product?

Honestly, by creating a spec and a new implementation from scratch, Facebook has done far more (in far less time) for PHP than Zend has in the last 5+ years.