Apparently, PHP is too slow for Facebook. In an effort to make drastic improvements to the speed of its applications and software, the social networking juggernaut has rewritten its PHP runtime from scratch, and will launch a big announcement to its 350 million users on Tuesday regarding the project. According to Alex Handy from the SD Times blog, Mark Zuckerberg and Co. plan to make it available as open source software, but no specific details on the project have been revealed. However, commentators of Handy’s blog post claim otherwise, saying that Facebook will release a compiler for PHP rather than a completely new runtime.
Last week, the core PHP team was invited to Facebook’s headquarters where they were forced to sign a NDA (non-disclosure agreement). It was rumored that Facebook hired someone two years ago to work on this project and Handy believes it was done solely.
Popular websites that are written in PHP include Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, and WordPress. Meanwhile, San Francisco-based micro-blogging platform Twitter is developed using Ruby and Rails.
I personally think that Facebook is among the slowest social networking sites out there. It would be a miracle if Facebook works well on my Firefox. And together with spam from “Click here to Donate to the victims in Haiti” and Farmville, my relationship with Facebook has distanced. Will the new compiler or runtime allow Facebook to perform much faster than before? Well, We will have to wait till Tuesday to find out what exactly they have done.
Via DownloadSquad & The Inquirer