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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

> This goes to show that technology stack is not as important as devs

Facebook PHP isn't the same as the standard PHP engine though - they've spent 20 years optimizing their own compiler and PHP engine/infrastructure:

> Overall, our experiments demonstrate that HipHop is about 5.5x faster than standard, interpreted PHP engines. As a result, HipHop has reduced the number of servers needed to run Facebook and other web sites by a factor between 4 and 6, thus drastically cutting operating costs.

https://research.facebook.com/publications/the-hiphop-compil...

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NB: that's from 12 years ago. HipHop didn't last long; a JITted PHP runtime (HHVM) replaced it at Facebook a few years later. Vanilla PHP also got a lot faster around versions 7 and 8.

The comparison was made in 2012 with PHP 5. PHP 8 is out now and likely includes most of Facebook's improvements. PHP 8 should be fast enough for any web app or backend.

A lot of Facebook those days is Node.js, Rust or Python.

Its no longer PHP heavy like it used to be.

There is absolutely no truth to that

FB is not using Python or Node? What’s the build pipeline for their frontend in then? Is GraphQL in PHP? Are AI services in PHP too?

Python is used all over the place but there is no node that I’ve ever seen. GraphQL is indeed in php, but the AI services are in python (I think)

What's the build pipeline for the React.js client in if its not in the Node.js?

I had a quick look and.. I have no idea. Frontend development at meta works differently than you probably imagine: things aren’t built locally but on dev servers or on-demand instances that all run services that take care of any build jobs in the background. I don’t know if there’s any nodejs involved at any point there or later in CI, but I suppose it’s possible. I still think it’s unlikely because my search turned up barely any mentions of nodejs, so I still think that my main point holds true: there’s very little node in use at meta, and nearly all the facebook frontend services are php (or python for Instagram/threads)

Is Haste still in use? Is it in PHP?

Looks like it, and yes, all PHP. Why did you think Meta was all nodejs and no more PHP anyways?

I've didn't think "no more PHP". I am just seeing how much non-PHP Meta open sources and talk with Meta guys at events who are building stuff for JS, talking about new client and varied tech stack and then you've told me "actually its still mostly PHP".

That’ll be because Facebook doesn’t use PHP as such, but Hack, which isn’t compatible with vanilla PHP. Hack isn’t really used much outside of Meta, so what’s the point of going through the extra work of open sourcing our stuff if nobody else will ever use it?

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