On Monday, September 18, 2017, Max Semenik <[email protected]> wrote: > Today, the HHVM developers made an announcement[1] that they have plans of > ceasing to maintain 100% PHP7 compatibility and concentrating on Hack > instead. > > While this does not mean that we need to take an action immediately, > eventually we will have to decide something. As I see it, our options are: > > 1) Continue requiring that MediaWiki uses a common set of HHVM and Zend > PHP. This, however, is a dead end and will make things progressively harder > as the implementations will diverge and various Composer libraries we use > will start requiring some Zend-specific features. > > 2) Declare our loyalty to HHVM. This will result in most of our current > users being unable to upgrade, eventually producing what amounts to a > WMF-only product and lots of installations with outdated MediaWiki having > security holes. At least we will be able to convert to Hack eventually. > This is a very clean-cut case of vendor lock-in though, and if Facebook > decides to switch their code base to something shinier, we'll be deep in > trouble. > > 3) Revert WMF to Zend and forget about HHVM. This will result in > performance degradation, however it will not be that dramatic: when we > upgraded, we switched to HHVM from PHP 5.3 which was really outdated, while > 5.6 and 7 provided nice performance improvements. > > I personally think that 3) is the only viable option in the long run. What > do you think? > > ---- > [1] http://hhvm.com/blog/2017/09/18/the-future-of-hhvm.html > > -- > Best regards, > Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]]) > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Well i agree that 3 seems likely the best long term option, we will probably be doing 1 in the short term. However I think it would be prudent to wait and see how things turn out in the short term before comitting to any path. The landscape can still shift quite a lot before the time comes when its impractical to continue doing 1. -- bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
