Facebook speeds up PHP

"We wish Facebook had made this project open, as we're sure many PHP developers would concur that the efforts <i>would have been much swifter</i> and more beneficial to the public had more folks and a larger team been involved from the outset."<p>Considering the uproar generated by introducing something like namespaces into PHP, I strongly suspect the opposite of the bit in italics to be true. In fact, that's possibly why they did it this way.

It might make more sense to wait the supposed few hours and see what Facebook actually releases. Especially if one is going to berate them for not releasing (as open-source) something before they've released anything.

They are wrong to say that Unladen Swallow gets a 5x speedup. That was their initial plan, but they claim now they were naive. Their speedup in less than 2x.<p>I think this reporting is a little haphazard.

There's so much disinformation in those comments. One person is happy that they are moving to php (what?), another person now has a good reason to say that php is faster than other languages. That's hilarious

"...that will increase speed by around 80%..."<p>I guess this is compared to plain PHP not to accelerators? And what exactly is the difference from a PHP accelerator?

Did they release any kind of benchmarks? I'm curious how this stacks up to passenger and Ruby enterprise edition (faster i'm sure), but would be interesting to see a side by side comparison.