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It's interesting to read all these comments and more interesting for me to constantly be hearing "But hey, Facebook's built on PHP".



That's mostly because PHP made sense at the time that decision was made - by the time it didn't they had too much legacy to make a complete rewrite worth it. Instead, they chose solutions that wouldn't require a complete rewrite by creating HHVM[1] and Hack[2].

And remember PHP was only used for the user-facing stuff (they probably had more Java and C++ than PHP when they began moving to Hack) - if you look at what they open source[3] only about half a dozen (out of over a hundred!) projects are PHP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language)

[3] https://github.com/facebook




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