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I would be willing to wager the shoes on my feet that this indexing system is not written in PHP.

Yeah, it's all brought to us by the friendly PHP folks who found it to be so dog slow they had to write a compiler to get it running at a decent speed. Further, they found the semantics so flaky, they actually wrote a statically typed variant on top of it, just because they're stuck with PHP.

Not all of it. Some of it, maybe. And given that they've forked PHP maybe even less than some.

PHP sometimes doesn't get the credit it deserves for what can be accomplished with it, particularly modern PHP... but i'm not entire sure it deserves credit for this in any reasonable way.

How are you so sure the search index functionality is written in PHP?