On Sep 18, 2017, at 1:58 PM, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Today, the HHVM developers made an announcement[1] that they have plans of ceasing to maintain 100% PHP7 compatibility and concentrating on Hack instead.
While this does not mean that we need to take an action immediately, eventually we will have to decide something. As I see it, our options are:
- Continue requiring that MediaWiki uses a common set of HHVM and Zend
PHP. This, however, is a dead end and will make things progressively harder as the implementations will diverge and various Composer libraries we use will start requiring some Zend-specific features.
- 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users being unable to upgrade, eventually producing what amounts to a WMF-only product and lots of installations with outdated MediaWiki having security holes.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.
- 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degradation, however it will not be that dramatic: when we upgraded, we switched to HHVM from PHP 5.3 which was really outdated, while 5.6 and 7 provided nice performance improvements.
Do we have performance benchmarks on 5.3 vs. HHVM vs. 5.6 vs. 7?
I personally think that 3) is the only viable option in the long run. What do you think?
[1] http://hhvm.com/blog/2017/09/18/the-future-of-hhvm.html
-- Best regards, Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]]) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l