Facebook Open-Sources HipHop PHP Compiler Software
Earlier this morning, Facebook officially made their new PHP “compiler,” called HipHop, available as open source software. In the blog post by Haiping Zhao, HipHop for PHP is described as a “source code transformer” which has allowed Facebook to nearly double their PHP operating speeds, at the cost of minor omissions such rarely used functions in the PHP language. For a site which serves nearly 400 billion PHP-based page views every month, that is an incredible performance boost. According to the article, Facebook is now serving over 90% of their traffic using HipHop.
Essentially, HipHop for PHP gains its performance increase by transforming the scripted PHP language into the compiled C++ language. Scripted languages typically have the advantage of being simple to learn, code, and debug while sacrificing speed. Compiled languages on the other hand have a steeper learning curve and are more strict; however, are considerably faster and better optimized to handle memory. Facebook seems to have found a balance between both worlds with HipHop for PHP.
HipHop for PHP was accurately described in an old anonymous interview with a Facebook employee. Many of the details match up with information published in this morning’s blog post.
If you would like to learn for about HipHop, Facebook will be streaming a live tech talk regarding HipHop for PHP this evening at 7:30PM Pacific. You can watch live coverage of the event here. There is also a developer mailing list to which you can subscribe, and a HipHop wiki (the link has not yet been posted). All of the above details and more can also be found on the developer blog.
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:47 pm
[...] Read this article: Facebook Open-Sources HipHop PHP Compiler Software [...]
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:31 am
[...] earlier announced that they are releasing their PHP compiler to open-source. I love it when a company uses open [...]
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:34 pm
HipHop seems really interesting, we have had to switch to lighttpd and xcache to achieve huge performance benefits for our objectCMS framework which is now faster that wordpress, joomla and drupal. I am wondering how hiphop compares to lighttpd and xCache, does anyone know when hiphop is going to be released to the public.
February 5th, 2010 at 6:13 am
[...] napokban be lett harangozva (bár még nem jelent meg a cég nyílt forrású projektjei között, de dolgoznak rajta), hogy a [...]
February 7th, 2010 at 4:46 am
[...] http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/02/02/facebook-open-sources-hiphop-php-compiler-software/ [...]
February 8th, 2010 at 4:58 am
[...] weren’t left in the dark either, there is the creation of HipHop for php (Facebook made this open-source), which is a way to get code out easier and the option to ask users [...]
February 17th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
[...] Seen on TechCrunch and insidefacebook.com [...]
February 23rd, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Hi!
I was create Yum repo for Centos 5
If you need HipHop PHP for Centos 5 – just download repo
All information on http://hostinghelp.biz/node/24
October 4th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
I cannot wait to try out HipHop. Now ASP.NET has some competition. The only thing ASP.NET had that PHP lacked was speed because PHP is an interpreter and ASP.NET runs compiled programs.
May 30th, 2011 at 7:24 pm
[...] User Experience Designer, Product Dev… Says here that they even have a PHP compiler in-house:http://www.insidefacebook.com/20…So yeah, it's PHP.This answer .Please specify the necessary improvements. Edit Link Text [...]