On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Daniel Friesen <daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com
wrote:
Actually, not to nitpick... ok, no, yeah I'm going to nitpick. Rewriting MediaWiki in any well accepted programming language besides PHP would have an extremely good chance of making it faster (well perhaps with the exception of our parser). I probably wouldn't pick Lua specifically as a target for rewriting, I'd probably Python or Node.js, bonus points if you use a flavor of Python that works async like gevent, Twisted, Tornado, etc...
This is not true. *Maybe* Python would be a good language to implement MediaWiki in, but recommending something like node.js for a website that needs to scale as big as Wikipedia will just not work (not to mention it's a terrible decision to voluntarily program in Javascript).
PHP's stateless per-request design is done on purpose, and it is not worse than a global state design; it's just different. PHP replaces global state with things like job queues and caches, and it tends to work pretty well. If anything it makes development easier because, not surprisingly, managing global state is incredibly difficult.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science