Facebook unveils HipHop for PHP

Facebook has unveiled a new PHP platform called HipHop for PHP that it says tremendously improves the performance of the PHP scripting language. HipHop for PHP works by transforming PHP code at the source code level into "highly optimized C++." This source code is then compiled using g++ into a format that is executed via a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system.

In essence, this allows PHP programmers to enjoy the huge performance boost only possible in C++ even as they continued working with the popular scripting language as they have in the past. At the back end, a rewrite of a number of common PHP Extensions was also done in order to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao, highlighted the scale of the problem encountered by Facebook. Noting how scripting languages are less efficient in CPU and memory usage, Zhao was quoting as saying, "Because of this, it's been challenging to scale Facebook to over 400 billion PHP-based pages views every month." 

Well, the team took two years to write over 300,000 lines of code to create HipHop for PHP. The project has had a "tremendous" impact on Facebook, achieving an average reduction in CPU utilization of 50 percent, which is a very substantial number. In the spirit of PHP's open source roots, the team has released the fruits of their labors under the same license.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek 

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