HipHop for PHP, Facebook’s Latest Open Source Release [UPDATE]
by Aayush On February 3rd,2010Facebook has just released their latest open source technology for PHP called HipHop, this technology transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++ which is then compiled with g++.
According to Facebook’s Official blog post regarding HipHop by Haiping Zhao, They claim that they’ve been able to reduce the CPU usage on Facebook’s Web servers by about fifty percent on average, depending upon the page. HipHop for PHP started as a hackathon project by Zhao, which in the last six months has been deployed at 90% of Facebook’s Production Servers.
He explained what HipHop does:
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.
About the Release:
We have also developed HPHPi, which is an experimental interpreter designed for development. When using HPHPi you don’t need to compile your PHP source code before running it. It’s helped us catch bugs in HipHop itself and provides engineers a way to use HipHop without changing how they write PHP.
Overall HipHop allows us to keep the best aspects of PHP while taking advantage of the performance benefits of C++. In total, we have written over 300,000 lines of code and more than 5,000 unit tests. All of this will be released this evening on GitHub under the open source PHP license.
Below is the embedded video of the Event:
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