Facebook's "HipHop" PHP translator [LWN.net]

Facebook's "HipHop" PHP translator

Posted Feb 3, 2010 14:50 UTC (Wed) by darthscsi (subscriber, #8111)
In reply to: Facebook's "HipHop" PHP translator by HelloWorld
Parent article: Facebook's "HipHop" PHP translator

Google's V8 implementation of JavaScript is not the fastest dynamically
typed language implementation. PLT Scheme is hardly the fastest
implementation Scheme and it handily beats Google's V8.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?
test=all&lang=v8&lang2=mzscheme

I wish Chez Scheme was on the list, as it's the fastest scheme I know of,
but it is a commercial implementation. It does all sorts of tricks with
object padding, stashing type tags for the common types inside pointers,
placing objects in per type regions (middle bits become type tags), type
inference and unboxing, and more.

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Facebook's "HipHop" PHP translator

Posted Feb 5, 2010 20:47 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Yes, perhaps it is possible to make a dynamically typed language almost as fast as a statically typed one. The question is, why bother? It makes the implementation much more complex in order to achieve the questionable goal of dynamic typing. I don't think that's a good idea.