Hi,
I was thinking that facebook and flickr were fully written in PHP, but someone told me that they use C++ as well and others. Now, what I want to know, is there a famous website which use pure PHP?
Well, lets be straight, first of all; nothing is written ‘fully’ in PHP. PHP does not generate output directly readable by the browser; that’s the purview of HTML, Javascript, and other technologies.
So… if you want to say ‘only PHP’, do you mean PHP/HTML? Javascript?
Facebook started totally in php, then they realized that they have outgrown the php and wanted to use a fastest possible language. That was C or C++, but they had so much code already written in php and most of their developers were php programmers, so suddenly rewriting everything from php to C++ was not an option. So they created something they call HipHop, a program that takes existing php code and compiles it as C++, basically converting php to C++
They have achieved the great performance gain and continue to write in php, then run the code through HipHop to compile it.
The good news is that they released HipHop as open source project.
Up untill about 2 years ago (or less) the facebook was running completely on php.
Yes, sure.
I’m not sure of a straight php repository of websites, however here is Zend Frameworks list of some case studies. http://www.zend.com/resources/case-studies/