On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 7:18 AM, James Douglas <[email protected]> wrote:
> I wonder whether Go's lack of parametric polymorphism might make it a
> pretty tough sell.  Given the potential benefit of introducing a statically
> typed language, it might be interesting to investigate and compare some of
> the different options.
>
> Regarding Yuri's point about tools, what would it take to integrate Hack
> into the current MediaWiki build processes?  It *seems* like it wouldn't be
> a huge diversion, but I'm quite unfamiliar with what's in place now.  Have
> we dabbled in Hack since the HHVM switch?

I'm not aware of any WMF/MediaWiki work being done in Hack yet.
Putting Hack into MediaWiki's core would be controversial but a stand
alone service/app could easily choose to use it I think. Changing from
PHP to Hack only requires changing the opening `<?php` to `<?hh`.
Today what Hack gives you is some syntactic sugar for various common
idioms from the Facebook internal code base and much stronger typing.
The last time I saw someone asking if it was faster on #hhvm the
answer was "not yet". Whether strong typing is a pro or a con of Hack
vs PHP seems like a religious debate that I'll try to stay out of
until the issue is forced. The bits most likely to be of interest in
the short term are the `async` and `await` keywords [0] and possibly
the Continuation class [1] which makes creating generators easier than
the PHP Iterator interface.


[0]: http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.async.php
[1]: http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.continuations.php

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <[email protected]>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855

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