Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by anthk | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

anthk·

Thou shall use the Rust rewrite of PHP.

View on HN

Why not skip the php and write rust directly?

Compatibility.

”Rewrite in Rust” fanboys are more annoying than crypto bros. How is such a feat even possible?

inb4 "Rewrite bitcoin in Rust" comments stars pouring in

I dunno,unlike the crypto/NFT era, Rust rewrites have demonstrated measured performance and memory savings gains. Some grimace when they see "written in Rust" as a tagline but my immediate thought tends to land more on the "thank God this isn't an electron app" side of things

Operative word is “fanboys”, I have mostly no qualms of actual rewrites to that language. It’s the fanboys who insist upon injecting themselves and their opinions everywhere with net negative impact.

You're comparing the rust rewrite of a web-based desktop application with the rust rewrite of a compiler+interpreter/jit. The former improves things by removing 12 layers of abstraction and an entire browser engine. The latter, not so much, it's already bare-metal.

So as much as people on this forum love to shit on it, PHP is already very fast and memory efficient.

The gains from the ongoing rust rewrite are (in order):

1. The author's ego-stroking

2. Claude's agentic capabilities show-case

3. Memory safety (to be confirmed)

Google funding, I suspect. One day they will turn off the tap and the mantra will be silenced.

"Strange; seems like all I hear about these days are projects funded by the world's largest advertising corporation."

Check RustPython and PhpRust, which already can run WP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com