On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 11:34 AM, Bryan Davis <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:21 AM, C. Scott Ananian
<cananian(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
There are other big users of HHVM -- do we know
what other members of the
larger community are doing? We've heard that Phabricator intends to
follow
PHP 7. Etsy also shifted to HHVM, do we know
what their plans are?
Etsy 'experimented' with HHVM [0] and then eventually switched to PHP7
as their primary runtime. The blog posts about this are a little
scattered, but Rasmus spoke about it [1] and Etsy started the phan
project [2].
I got confirmation on twitter:
https://twitter.com/jazzdan/status/910162545805336576
For what it's worth, my opinion is that PHP is an
actual FLOSS
software project with years of history and core contributions from
Zend who make their living with PHP. HHVM is a well funded internal
project from Facebook that has experimented with FLOSS but ultimately
is controlled by the internal needs of Facebook. For me the choice
here is obviously to back the community driven FLOSS project and help
them continue to thrive.
Fair enough. My point is just that we should stop and reflect that this is
a major inflection point. Language choices are sticky, so this decision
will have significant long-term implications. We should at least stop to
evaluate PHP7 vs Hack and determine which is a better fit for our codebase,
and do due diligence on both sides (count how many engineers, how many open
source contributors, commit rates, etc). HHVM has been flirting with a
LLVM backend, and LLVM itself has quite a large and active community. The
PHP community has had issues with proper handling of security patches in
the past. I'm suggesting to proceed cautiously and have a proper
discussion of all the factors involved instead of over-simplifying this to
"community" vs "facebook".
For example, the top-line github stats are:
hhvm: 504 contributors (24,192 commits)
php-src: 496 contributors (104,566 commits)
HHVM seems to have a larger community of contributors despite a much
shorter active life. But note that the PHP github mirror has been broken
since Jul 29 (!). In the past 6 days I count 8 distinct contributors to
php-src, and 10 distinct contributors in the past *two days* to hhvm (one
of whom contributed an OCAML frontend(!)). These are just hand-wavy
figures; ideally we should try to determine how many of the recent
contributors to each project are employed by Facebook and/or Zend.
I think there's room for a reasonable debate.
--scott