Rasmus made a bunch of reasonable comments and the Times article cut and spliced them to try to stir up some noise.<p>i.e., he described the project as a "nifty trick", not "just a nifty trick", which is an important distinction.<p>Also, he advocates -- <i>shock</i> -- tuning your PHP code before turning to tools like this.<p>...Somehow, that turned into him asking if it was "just a nifty trick".<p>This should probably be flagged, it's nonsense.
Who said i didn't like nifty tricks.<p>As someone who can proudly admit to loving PHP (she makes me $) im fairly interested in HipHop. I've been thinking about this problem in PHP for some time, and was this || close to doing exactly what facebook has done.<p>The ability to write PHP and have it transformed down to C++ and compiled is pretty sweet. Its PHP with out the PHP. Sure its brand-spanking-new so we all need to watch and see whats to come. I mean; code is still not released.
<i>Noting the amount of hype he's seen lately about the new runtime, Lerdorf wrote, "I'd love to see those same people get excited about basic profiling and identifying the most costly areas of an application. Speeding up one of the faster parts of your system isn't going to give you anywhere near as much of a benefit as speeding up, or eliminating, one of the slower parts of your overall system.</i><p>Good advice, and one that I've been guilty of myself. Often I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time on the fixes and enhancements that are unlikely to yield a huge improvement, instead of focusing on larger issues, because they're harder or just because everyone is talking about the new shiny tool.<p>Not to take the analogy too far, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs do this in a business sense as well, focusing efforts on the new shiny things (Facebook, Twitter) instead of the more boring, but proven tools (phone, email). The bottom line is that you should be strategic in where you spend your time, instead of chasing whatever the cool kids are talking about.
gotta love the NYT completely taking things out of context like a tabloid.<p>"My "nifty trick" comment to RWW wasn't meant to be negative or belittling of HipHop PHP in any way. Check the comments <a href="http://bit.ly/cH1qyV" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/cH1qyV</a> @rasmus
One drum I've been banging is that profiling PHP with XDebug is a lot more effort than it should be. If I'm on a headless web server, why do I have to transfer the massive cache grind files to my local machine?<p>Happily Facebook have an internal lightweight profiler they've open-sourced called XHProf:<p><a href="http://mirror.facebook.net/facebook/xhprof/doc.html" rel="nofollow">http://mirror.facebook.net/facebook/xhprof/doc.html</a><p>It provides a web-based instant view of the results, and while it's not as extensive as XDebug, it's perfect for 95% of my investigations. Just a shame no one's ever heard of it!
Sure, a lot of people do not profile and optimize, but has anyone considered the environmental aspects of this? Faster code (as a result of profiling an compilation to C++ and then to machine code) = much closer to the metal, which means more efficiency and less wasted electricity and more space in a rack somewhere.