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Comment by jtreminio | Hacker News Reader

From my understanding, if the day ever comes where the official PHP engine is switched to HHVM, it would catapult performance past Python and Ruby in pretty much all scenarios.

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Predicting the future is risky.

HHVM exists. You can benchmark it against Python and Ruby today. What are the results?

In any case, Python has things like cx_freeze that can be used to make apps close to compiled performance. And Python is not a single monolithic implementation. IronPython running on .NET for instance. PyPy has a VM with JIT.

In any case, few people these days are worried about raw performance of apps. There are easier things to fix with page load times, getting rid of resource locking, and so on.

HHVM will extend PHP's useful lifetime but outside of Facebook, Drupal-based sites, and WordPress-based sites, I don't see it growing in any significant way.

cx_freeze just package python apps so you can distribute them like native apps, that is without requiring the installation of the python interpreter. It doesn't impact performance.

Performance oriented pythonners go with pypy, numpy, cython, numba, etc. Each of them gives a very significant speed boost.

If you add up Facebook + Drupal + Wordpress you probably come to a large % of total worldwide pageviews.

Versus native Python and Ruby, perhaps. Versus PyPy and Ruby Motion? Probably not.

I think what the parent comment meant was that the "official" PHP would catapult past the "official" python & ruby.

I believe the correct way to refer to them is not "official", but "reference". The reasoning for this being that most languages encourage others to implement a compiler/interpreter.

I find that under most circumstances php-fpm and nginx is already enormously snappy and resource miserly, especially compared to rails. That's just anecdotal but I've seen the same thing in a lot of places. Performance wise PHP is in a pretty reasonable state except at scales that only a few companies in the world have to worry about.

Does HHVM get massive gains for "normal" PHP code? I remember reading something about FB's early efforts, and there were strict guidelines about proper usage and whatnot.

I have no idea how "good" "normal" PHP code is written compared to Ruby/Python.

We tried HHVM for use with our "normal" PHP.

There was a measurable performance increase, but it was disappointing overall. Perhaps my initial hopes were too high.

Our company is small and engineering/ops resources are very limited, leading to a lot of pragmatic decisions. After a few days of experimentation, I decided that HHVM was promising, but for us it's not yet worth the extra ops infrastructure.

We get much bigger improvements tuning other pieces of our stack.

It works for Wordpress and Drupal, and those contain 90% of PHP functions. I mean there are times you will find issues or what not, but for the most part it's pretty good.

"official PHP engine is switched to HHVM, it would catapult performance past Python and Ruby in pretty much all scenario" <-- official php performs faster than ruby/python anyway!!

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