Hi! > I agree the short timeline seems to push us toward reverting to Zend. But > it is worth having a meaningful discussion about the long-term outlook. > Which VM is likely to be better supported in 15 years' time? Which VM
15 years is a lot to predict. 15 years ago Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Linkedin did not exist and Slashdot, Livejournal, etc. were all the rage. We don't even know if Facebook as such would exist in 15 years or would have budget to support its own language. > would we rather adopt and maintain indefinitely ourselves, if needed -- > since in a 15 yr timeframe it's entirely possible that (a) Facebook could > abandon Hack/HHVM, or (b) the PHP Zend team could implode. Maintaining While (b) could happen, PHP project is not very dependent on Zend for its existence. Zend owns none of the infrastructure or processes, and while a lot of performance work on PHP 7 was conducted by Zend team (and they are still working on improvements AFAIK), there are plenty of community members that do not work for Zend and do not depend on Zend in any way. Of course, it is possible that the whole community would implode, but here we have many more stakeholders than in Hack case, where the stakeholder is mostly a single - albeit large and currently very successful - company. > speaking, it's not really a choice between "lock-in" and "no lock in" -- we > have to choose to align our futures with either Zend Technologies Ltd or > Facebook. One of these is *much* better funded than the other. It is Again, I do not think this is the right statement to make. The control of Zend Tech as a company over the future of PHP is much less than Facebook's one over Hack (which is pretty much absolute). PHP is guided by the community, decisions are taken by using community processes in which Zend does not have any special role, and PHP project could survive reasonably survive without Zend, even if with less resources. Most PHP infrastructure - Composer, debugging, IDEs, profiling, code quality, frameworks, etc. - are completely independent of Zend (which also has a number of tools, but it is not the only provider). So I do not think it is an adequate comparison. I am not sure if Hack has an open-source community outside Facebook (if anybody has pointers to that, please share - commit numbers certainly don't tell much) - but it is pretty clear to me that Facebook is in absolute control over this platform. This is not the case with Zend and PHP. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
