On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:40 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cananian(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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".
PHP is an open-source language with mature tooling and major community
buy-in. Facebook has *promised* to turn Hack into an open-source language
with mature tooling and community buy-in; almost none of that exists
currently. Once it already does, a worthwhile discussion might be had about
switching to Hack. Right now it would be incredibly irresponsible.
Also, making PHP a viable language for third parties is the core business
model of Zend. Making Hack a viable language for third parties has
absolutely nothing to do with the business model of Facebook. At any point
they might decide it is a distraction they don't need. Comparing commit
numbers is not really meaningful without knowing what fraction of those
committers can disappear overnight if Facebook reconsiders its priorities.
IMO the more interesting discussion to be had is how little we invest into
the technology our whole platform is based on. You'd think the largest
production user of PHP would pay at least one part-time PHP developer, or
try to represent itself in standards and roadmap discussions, but we do
not. Is that normal?