Can be PHP Programming Language Gazing at Radical Changes
If well located sources are to be believed, the PHP programming language is established to undergo development of future versions thanks to the increasing influence of Facebook engineers.
In attracting inspiration from the attempts being made by the social media giants to improve the performance of this popular open-source Web coding language, the core team of PHP developers have launched into an effort to redesign the language for faster performance. In simple fact, they have started a new branch of the language called phpng or PHP Next Generation.
The main idea behind the release of this new version is a reorganization of the internal APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) so that the code could generally benefit from being used in a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. In the new branch known as phpng, it does not include JIT capabilities. Rather, it seeks to solve the problems that presently prevent the executor from obtaining optimal performance by cleaning up some of the core APIs and increasing overall memory usage.
In the modern scenario, PHP works as an understood language, meaning that the processor directly executes the source code. In standard terms, programs written using such interpreted languages are not as quick at compiling and running as, say, C or C++. The latter have recently been compiled beforehand into machine language byte code that can be executed more successfully by the processor.
Facebook has always been among one of the larger users of this programming terminology and recently came up with a JIT compiler for the PHP code known as HHVM or Hip Hop Virtual Equipment. This release was critical in sparking the interest of the developer community in terms of JIT is worried.
Similar in numerous ways to the Java Virtual Equipment (JVM), HHVM compiles the PHP language into octet code after request from the user. Engineers and developers at Facebook found that it was in a position of getting code execution as much as nine times faster. The source code was released in the hope that it would be used outside Facebook or myspace and influence the builders of the programming terminology to improve it further.
While phpng is much from being suited to creation work as yet, after completion this very same code may form the basis for the release of PHP 6 and 7 versions. Presently, version 5. 5 is the latest working release.
The core developers claim that any future iteration on this programming language will be designed as backward appropriate, meaning that any code written for earlier editions of the language will be able to run unmodified on the new versions as well.
Quite a few developers working with this script for website and web applications development have, however, expressed concern at the changes. They may have explained that it will lead to a number of popular exts being rendered unusable, thus reducing the favor division of the upgrade among existing users.
The mod_php server API, for illustration, is likely to be discontinued in the improved version. Many sites use this API to allow the Apache Web Machine to deal with numerous tasks on behalf of the encoding language. Speculations claim that the development of phpng may have been triggered by the release of Facebook Hack, a PHP-like language with a quantity of features not usually seen in the most popular development language.
As the 7th most heavily used developing language in the world, the city of PHP developers is a significant one. While the changes are likely to be accepted with open forearms, they will be wishing that modifications are not made to the overall benefits of the language that will render it pointless in a number of projects and affect it is overall popularity.
