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Comment by jQueryIsAwesome | Hacker News Reader

So Facebook must be on those $3 per month servers... right? The only thing you said that make sense is the last sentence.

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http://www.quora.com/Why-hasn-t-Facebook-migrated-away-from-...

They use it cautiously and reluctantly because they don't have much choice at this point. The Asana and Quora founders ditched it at the earliest opportunity.

Asana and Quora ditched PHP? Is it supposed to be news that a small tech company changed their architecture? Happens all the time.

Clearly, Facebook is in a different PHP area than your bog-standard $3/month crowd. Facebook has an advanced PHP tool chain that compiles PHP down to C++ (hip-hop)and they reap performance gains from that. They also built PHP repl (phpsh) because `php -a` sucks.

Facebook doesn't technically run PHP anymore; they transform their PHP into C++ and run that because PHP is too slow.

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

Using a compiler doesn't mean your code isn't written in the source language.

I didn't say that they don't write it, I said that they don't actually run it. :)

By that logic, they don't run C++ either; they run machine code. So does everyone else.

But to be fair, their PHP is a subset of the official PHP, and they probably use all of their own libraries (rather than the ones you have access to outside of Facebook).

So if you want Facebook to be your PHP success story, all you get out of it is "PHP didn't kill their company; they were eventually able to move away", which I suppose is not exactly a swimming endorsement.

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