Devis LucatoHipHop for PHP: Move Fast
"One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster."
"Finding new ways to improve PHP performance isn't a new concept. At run time the Zend Engine turns your PHP source into opcodes which are then run through the Zend Virtual Machine. Open source projects such as APC and eAccelerator cache this output and are used by the majority of PHP powered websites. There's also Zend Server, a commercial product which makes PHP faster via opcode optimization and caching. Instead, we were thinking about transforming PHP source directly into C++ which can then be turned into native machine code. Even compiling PHP isn't a new idea, open source projects like Roadsend and phc compile PHP to C, Quercus compiles PHP to Java, and Phalanger compiles PHP to .Net."
"We are proud to say that at this point, we are serving over 90% of our Web traffic using HipHop, all only six months after deployment."
