Three comments:
1) The Register is to 'news' as the New York Post is to the New York Times, which is to say its amusing at times and sometimes a good lead into something that is actually important, but rarely the definitive source for any story.<p>2) The entrepreneurial take away is that Web 2.0 has been racing ahead of hardware, its been able to do that because computers got better faster and iterating has proven more valuable that polishing.<p>There are opportunities to be found by taking a good long look at where the technologies used can benefit from abstraction/compilation love. Remember that in 2005 putting together a 8,000 'node' cluster was really on the fringe, today that is 500 boxes with a dual Core i7 motherboard in them.<p>3) In case you haven't noticed this reads like a Facebook Fanboi insulting a Google Fanboi. Apparently it was modestly successful in this regard if you measure success by vitriol in the comments on the article.
What could this sentence possibly mean?<p>"His crew can build a more than 1GB in about 15 minutes (after stripping out debug information)"<p>1GB binary? 1GB of PHP? 1GB of C++ output? None of these sound like a good idea.
Original FB blog post, which has more facts less fanboi trolling:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390751" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390751</a>
<i>The idea is that you can still code with high-level PHP, but then get the performance of C++</i><p>I love this quote, because C++ was built with the exact same abstraction in mind.
So they dropped some rarely used functionality from PHP,... like serialization.<p>Excuse me, "rarely used"?? Drupal strongly depends on serialization, to store data structures in the database (or, as they call it, "the cache").<p>You cannot effectively run Drupal without serialization. So "The likes of Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress are now using HipHop." sounds like it cannot be true.