Research fail

This morning I was reading about KPHP, something developed by VKontakt (the Russian Facebook). You can read about it here: About kPHP: how to speed up the kittens VKontakte. As far as I can gather (using Google Translate), KPHP is similar to Facebook's HipHoPHP compiler. The difference being that KPHP is meant to compile much faster than HHPHP.

It sounds like KPHP doesn't support OOP. It seems funny that such a large website would be written in a procedural style. But they are planning to add OOP support and will open source the project when it is ready.

Reading the comments on that article I also learned that Facebook have a version of HHPHP that doesn't require you to compile your PHP: Getting WordPress running on HHVM. It sounds like there are also compatibility issues with that.

The main point I took away from both KPHP and HHPHP is that any speed benefit depends on how your code is written, and strictly typed code should execute faster. So it does make me think whether I should start writing strictly typed code, just so that in the future it could be able to be compiled and give a good speed benefit.

I spent quite a while today trying to research a description for a pano. Unfortunately I couldn't find any more information than the small amount I managed to find yesterday.

In the afternoon I made some raisin and walnut pumpkin muffins.

In the evening I was trying to research the next pano that I intend to process, to see if the water fountain had a name. I couldn't find any info about the water fountain at all though. Seems I'm not having much luck in my description researching lately :(

I watched Autumn Watch in the evening as well.