[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development - eviltoast

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Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if “PHP is still relevant?” Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway… happy birthday!

  • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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    2 months ago

    It’s very rare that the backend language significantly affects performance. In 99% of apps you could have the most optimized backend written directly in machine language, and you’d just shave off milliseconds.

    That’s because in web development most of the latency comes from i/o (network requests, database access, file access), not from computation being slow.

    • buttnugget@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      So why did Facebook build that whole system of converting C++ to PHP or whatever they did? Was it because they didn’t understand the savings? Or when you scale that high, the savings really are significant? Were there savings?

      Edit to subtract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM is what it eventually turned into, and apparently it showed significant improvements even above the previous system.