On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Daniel Friesen <daniel(a)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