[PLUG] Facebook & PHP - massive speedup

Tony Rick tonyr42 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 5 00:06:45 UTC 2010


On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Randal L. Schwartz <merlyn at stonehenge.com>wrote:

> The speed of a language has very little to do with "interpreted" or
> "compiled".  There's a lot more going on, far more variables than that,
> like
> whether the language has early or late binding, or expensive flexible data
> types.
>
> That's the myth I'm talking about.
>
> For example, bash's slowness is because it has to do a lot of forking.
> Nothing to do with "interpreted".  I could go down that list and explain
> each
> one of those.
>

I admit that I labor under the myth (and I imagine that a significant
portion of the population of programmers and SwEng managers do, too), but I
am intrigued by Randal's thesis.  Some pointers to literature on the subject
would be most welcome. (Never let it be said, however, that I would want to
put the kibosh on what is shaping up to be a lively discussion).

- tony



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