On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 1:58 PM, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2) Declare our loyalty to HHVM. This will result in
most of our current
users being unable to upgrade, eventually producing what amounts to a
WMF-only product and lots of installations with outdated MediaWiki having
security holes. At least we will be able to convert to Hack eventually.
This is a very clean-cut case of vendor lock-in though, and if Facebook
decides to switch their code base to something shinier, we'll be deep in
trouble.
Hack has a couple interesting points, especially its async system, but
isn't _hugely_ compelling at this point.
If they're going to be dropping destructors and references we'd have to
retool our RAII patterns and our hook 'out-param' patterns to work with
future-Hack, but that's possible if we *want* to make such a change.
However I don't see a lot of interest in such a change in this discussion
or among TechCom, and buying into a single-vendor system is a risk both for
us (if they change the language in ways we don't like or drop it) and
others (harder to set up if few HHVM providers).
3) Revert WMF to Zend and forget about HHVM. This will result in
performance degradation, however it will not be that dramatic: when we
upgraded, we switched to HHVM from PHP 5.3 which was really outdated, while
5.6 and 7 provided nice performance improvements.
Migrating WMF's implementation to PHP 7 is probably the way to go. I leave
it up to ops to figure out how to make the change. :)
-- brion