On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 11:34 AM, Bryan Davis <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:21 AM, C. Scott Ananian > <[email protected]> wrote: > > There are other big users of HHVM -- do we know what other members of the > > larger community are doing? We've heard that Phabricator intends to > follow > > PHP 7. Etsy also shifted to HHVM, do we know what their plans are? > > Etsy 'experimented' with HHVM [0] and then eventually switched to PHP7 > as their primary runtime. The blog posts about this are a little > scattered, but Rasmus spoke about it [1] and Etsy started the phan > project [2]. > I got confirmation on twitter: https://twitter.com/jazzdan/status/910162545805336576 > For what it's worth, my opinion is that PHP is an actual FLOSS > software project with years of history and core contributions from > Zend who make their living with PHP. HHVM is a well funded internal > project from Facebook that has experimented with FLOSS but ultimately > is controlled by the internal needs of Facebook. For me the choice > here is obviously to back the community driven FLOSS project and help > them continue to thrive. > Fair enough. My point is just that we should stop and reflect that this is a major inflection point. Language choices are sticky, so this decision will have significant long-term implications. We should at least stop to evaluate PHP7 vs Hack and determine which is a better fit for our codebase, and do due diligence on both sides (count how many engineers, how many open source contributors, commit rates, etc). HHVM has been flirting with a LLVM backend, and LLVM itself has quite a large and active community. The PHP community has had issues with proper handling of security patches in the past. I'm suggesting to proceed cautiously and have a proper discussion of all the factors involved instead of over-simplifying this to "community" vs "facebook". For example, the top-line github stats are: hhvm: 504 contributors (24,192 commits) php-src: 496 contributors (104,566 commits) HHVM seems to have a larger community of contributors despite a much shorter active life. But note that the PHP github mirror has been broken since Jul 29 (!). In the past 6 days I count 8 distinct contributors to php-src, and 10 distinct contributors in the past *two days* to hhvm (one of whom contributed an OCAML frontend(!)). These are just hand-wavy figures; ideally we should try to determine how many of the recent contributors to each project are employed by Facebook and/or Zend. I think there's room for a reasonable debate. --scott _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
