Facebook working to improve PHP?

According to Alex Handy of the SD Times, "Facebook has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch," and will be making an announcement somewhere this week to that effect. However, Handy later backpedaled somewhat, and in an update to the original blog entry, said he is inclined toward thinking that Facebook will be introducing a compiler for PHP instead.

While there might be disagreements as to the precise nature of improvements that Facebook might have done to PHP, the consensus is unanimous that even minor improvements will yield major benefits for the major Web player with their thousands of servers.

And where its speed is concerned, practically everyone seems to agree that PHP is slow, including Jeff Cogswell, editor of Ziff Davis Enterprise's DevSource, who said "in the past I did a lot of work with PHP, and I was constantly fighting with the fact that PHP was SLOOOOOW, which wasn't a surprise when you look at the architecture of the engine."

For more on this story:
- here's the SD Times article
- here's the eWeek article

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