Thanks for all the replies, lots of interesting information in them. There's too many to quote and reply to individually, but I just wanted to clarify one point that some people didn't quite seem to get:
The JVM != the Java language. The Java language is what it is. A lot of people use it, but very few are particularly enthusiastic about it. I have nothing to say about it, pro or con, in the context of this discussion. The JVM, on the other hand, is an extremely impressive bit of engineering that is being used more and more to host languages other than Java. Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure, which is a variant of Lisp that runs on the JVM, explains some of the reasons why leveraging the JVM for other languages better than I can under the heading "Languages and Platforms" at http://clojure.org/rationale. Running PHP on the JVM doesn't mean making PHP more like Java. It just means running the PHP language on a platform with a lot of benefits and advantages, and given the differences in engineering resources dedicated to each, one that's likely to continue to improve a lot faster than the native PHP runtime. As far as HipHop, from what I've seen it holds zero interest for me right now. If you're FaceBook, and you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on servers every year then squeezing 5% or 10% more performance out of you code is probably worthwhile. But with only a few hundred servers running the PHP applications I'm responsible for, I'm much more interested in developing less-buggy applications faster, leveraging other people's frameworks instead of reinventing the wheel (hence my interest in Java), improving monitoring and deployment, etc. -- Arnold -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
