Should Wikipedia's software be rewritten in Ruby on Rails? Options Rating

[LamontStormstar]

Should Wikipedia's software be rewritten in Ruby on Rails? Discuss.

[Somey]

Personally, now that Delphi for PHP exists, I can't imagine why anyone would want to switch from PHP to Ruby on Rails, unless they were already skilled in it of course.

[LamontStormstar]

Personally, now that Delphi for PHP exists, I can't imagine why anyone would want to switch from PHP to Ruby on Rails, unless they were already skilled in it of course.

I once worked on Delphi back in the 1990s. I'd tried visual basic, then I tried Delphi. Delphi was only a little slower to develop in than Visual Basic and Delphi was more powerful and code was slower. I then tried C++ because a friend recommedned it, which was hard and slow to develop in, though code got even smaller and the program was faster. I later gave up on C++.

I'm not sure what Delphi for PHP is about. Delphi is a bit of a better language than PHP

Java would probably be even slower than PHP. Whenever I go to a website with a java applet, if it is really complex it slows my computer way down.

Server side Java is nothing like client-side java. The slowness you're experiencing is due to your browser launching a JVM inside the browser. Server side Java doesn't have this problem; the JVM is already running in the server and all you get is the same HTML you'd get from the PHP app -- it's just generated that much faster. A properly implemented Java webapp will run rings around a PHP app.

MediaWiki runs 25% faster just by running it within Quercus, which is pretty much just a PHP interpreter written in Java. A full reimplementation in Java would be 50% to 75% faster.

I doubt that a Ruby on Rails implementation would be that much faster as RoR is, like PHP, a fully interpreted language (although the odds are that the RoR interpreter is more efficient than PHP, as PHP's is just about the worst-performing interpreter there is in common use). Java is at least compiled to JVM code. The only way to get faster than that would be to go to a fully compiled language like C or C++.

Hmm... isn't the native PHP interpreter written in C++ or something low-level? If it's not, that's surprising.