HipHop PHP (was Hyper PHP by Facebook)

Question

Following this rather comical interview with a Facebook "employee"...

Does anybody have any details on the Hyper PHP (now renamed to HipHop ) that those smart as balls Facebook guys have developed?

Answer 1

The cat is out of the sack now:

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=358

HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

Another article on ReadWrite Web confirms Facebook Gets Faster, Debuts Homegrown PHP Compiler and another one by Marco Tabini describes what you need to know.

Answer 2

Maybe a myth, maybe still in development. But it's going to be posted here .

Answer 3

如果该版本被称为HyperPHP，我会感到惊讶，因为它也是已建立的Web主机的名称

Answer 4

现在有传言称，2月2日星期二从Facebook 发布了某种PHP运行时版本 。这可能是Hyper PHP。

Answer 5

Looks like someone tried to explain caching/opcodes to someone without any programming knowledge.

"... You see? Doing this is like, putting an H in front of PHP, H as in Hyper. So we get, Hyper-PHP, or HPHP. And it's super fast ..."

Answer 6

Nop ... its not a myth

The concept is Awesome.. You can get you PHP site complied into HPHP ! then it ll work like java !:P

Answer 7

From your link...

Facebook employees know better than most the value of privacy.

Oh, really? Do they? Because everything I've ever read about Facebook is that they have no idea what privacy is or ever was.

The article can obviously not be trusted.

Answer 8

If performance is an issue, surely you'd look at eg Quercus instead ? ( http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/ ) (I've never looked at Quercus, so I can't say much else)