PHP’s parser refers to e.g.::internally asT_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM, and the<<operator asT_SL. I say “internally”, but as above, this is what’s shown to the programmer when::or<<appears in the wrong place.
The epitome of “this thing sucks” article. Analysis of EVERYTHING that's wrong with PHP down to a tiny detail.
When anybody will start complaining to me about some technology, I will refer him to this article.
I was at the IPC Spring Edition conference in Berlin presenting my talk “Integrating Erlang with PHP”. I started by talking about all the wonders that Erlang promises such as:
- Code reload without stoping the server.
- Being ready for multicore programming.
- No shared state.
When the audience looked at me like: “hey PHP already does that”, I realized how much Kool Aid I had drunk.
While the article is not really defending PHP, it gives some perspective on recent hype about functional languages.
The end result of all this is that PHP 6 development eventually stalled. The Unicode problems made a release impossible while blocking other features from showing up in any PHP release at all. Eventually some work was backported to 5.3, but that is always a problematic solution; it brings back memories of the 2.5 kernel development series.
Amusing story of how PHP 6 development effort failed when confronted with Unicode.
HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.
Pragmatic approach: instead of complaining how wrong PHP is (and it is :) ), Facebook accepted the fact it's also easy and popular, and made it fast.
