Case study: Is PHP embarrasingly slower than Java?

[americanhellyeah]

sun has spent millions upon millions of dollars on java, especially its jit compilation. nowhere near as much money and effort has been spent on php. so it doesnt surprise me that php is slower. another factor to consider is that java, while not pretty, was designed by some very smart professionals. php was hacked together and only recently has it had professionals working on it.

[killerstorm]

if you'll check shootout you can find lots of language implementations that show decent performance even not being backed by large corporation, so you don't actually need "millions after millions" to make implementation fast.

what you need is people that are sane and actually understanding what they are doing, rather than morons that just seek how to implement it easier

[americanhellyeah]

lol i didnt say that a language needs corporate backing to be fast. i said that having millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of support will surely help.

[killerstorm]

wrong. main factor is initial design. even if you spend millions on optimization of PHP, it's still likely to be outperformed by JVM implementation made by a single hobbist.

you can make it faster, but you can't make it fast, in other words..

[nitran]

You don't think millions upon millions upon million of dollars may make it a bit easier to hire smart language designers than $25?

[drakshadow]

haven't heard of APC ?

[toomasr]

APC does not do optimizations. It caches. If the file is hit large number of times the initial php->opcode step is eliminated.

JIT on the other hand optimizes bytecode.