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?

Celtic

Why? Since they are rewriting from scratch, couldn't they go for an already established option? Or do they think all the existing languages are not so good. – Lollipop

I find it funny it would be called 'HyperPHP' as the H in PHP stands for Hyper. Hyper Hypertext Preprocessor. – Acidhead

Related: #2187905 – Sayre

@Christy, if they look for another language, it would mean rewriting Facebook. – Elytron

@christy They aren't "rewriting from scratch". They claim that a full rewrite would have been far more difficult than the development of HPHP. – Crock

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.

Puckett

That quote annoys me. A compiler is a source code transformer. – Crept

So if I use XSLT to transform XML, I made a compiler, huh? – Capitalistic

@Viet: Technically, yes. An XSLT processor compiles an XML file into another output format. – Spindlelegs

@Puckett Thank you for your response on this post. Can you please explain the advantages of HipHop Virtual machine- #8697848 Thanks – Braided

Answer 2

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

Superannuation

i don't do why i have a feeling that this article is fake. "trillion photos". – Coshow

Answer 3

I'd be surprised if the release is called HyperPHP, as that's also the name of an established web host

Concise

Answer 4

Now there's a rumor of some sort of PHP runtime release from Facebook on Tuesday Feb 2. That might be Hyper PHP.

Gluttonize

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 ..."

Ambrosius

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

Piste

It is nothing like Java - no bytecode, no jit, no virtual machine. It simply transforms php code into optimized c++ and then compiles it to native machine code. – Crinkumcrankum

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.

Welcher

There is nothing to be trusted or not now anymore. Check out the link in my answer. It is official now. They will opensource HipHop for PHP tonight. – Puckett

Answer 8

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

Paleethnology