I think we should migrate MediaWiki to target HipHop [1] as its
primary high-performance platform. I think we should continue to
support Zend, for the benefit of small installations. But we should
additionally support HipHop, use it on Wikimedia, and optimise our
algorithms for it.
In cases where an algorithm optimised for HipHop would be excessively
slow when running under Zend, we can split the implementations by
subclassing.
I was skeptical about HipHop at first, since the road is littered with
the bodies of dead PHP compilers. But it looks like Facebook is pretty
well committed to this one, and they have the resources to maintain
it. I waited and watched for a while, but I think the time has come to
make a decision on this.
Facebook now write their PHP code to target HipHop exclusively, so by
trying to write code that works on both platforms, we'll be in new
territory, to some degree. Maybe that's scary, but I think it can work.
Who's with me?
-- Tim Starling
[1]
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/