Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, except that the examples don't line up exactly. For example, in PHP it's trivial to store the file contents in a var and refer to that over and over (as OP does in Ruby), but instead he chooses to read from the file over and over again and then calls that a shortcoming of PHP vs Ruby when that's purely an implementation decision.

Ruby is clean (but I dislike the stack), and Python looks good, but ye gads is Closure ugly... Uglier than PHP, even.

My favorite part about PHP is how easy it is to get a simple Nurble-like app up and running... but that's just me.

View on HN

OK, I'll bite: how would you store the array of words in memory across requests in PHP? As far as I'm aware, the runtime deliberately doesn't provide a way to do that.

The closest you could get is to store it in $_SESSION, but that's per-user rather than global, and it still has to read the data from your session handler. Which by default just uses flat files, so we're no better off than we started.

The APC opcode cache extension also has a user cache which has an API similar to memcache but a bit faster since it's using shared memory and not going over the network. It's shared between all visitors across all requests.

http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php

APC. It comes as part of the official package as of 5.2.

Deleted comment

... And that is something exclusive to PHP?

You could submit a pull request to make his examples better.

https://github.com/adambard/nurblizer-php

https://github.com/adambard/Nurblizer

https://github.com/adambard/py-nurblizer

https://github.com/adambard/nurblizer-clj

Please do, I'll update and edit as appropriate. I wasn't aware a trivial way existed of storing a persistent variable in PHP between existed. I bet I'll feel dumb when I find out what it is, though.

You can do it with APC, but beyond that, no, your solution is the PHP way to do it.

I think his point was just that you could hard-code your list of words into the code. It would be ugly, but it would work.

Isn't that the same as loading them from file on each request?

You would also want to install an opcode cache like APC, XCache, etc. That way the code is only compiled on the first page load.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators

No, because you don't have additional IO overhead.

I think that overhead would be negligible, especially if the other examples are all based on micro-frameworks (i.e. loads of files).

Premature optimisation is the root of all evil, right?

Disk IO is a massive problem at scale. This obviously isn't "at scale", so it works fine here, but avoiding hitting the disk (edit: any slow IO, really) is Performance 101.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com