chroot

HipHop for PHP - What!?

itsjustnikc:

At the Facebook Technology Tasting yesterday, some Facebook engineers revealed a new type of open source PHP technology, HipHop for PHP. It’s been developed by a team of developers at Facebook who have been working on the project for over 2 years.

The project was initially aimed at making Facebook run smoother (the back-end servers) where the team say they have managed to reduce the CPU usage on their web servers by 50% (depending on the page being requested). This means that companies, like Facebook, can use less servers leading to less overheads.

Now at first I was told it was a compiler by a couple of other engineers from other companies, but apparently it’s not technically a compiler, it’s rather 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.”

So reading through the blog it appears that HipHop aims to do the folllowing:

• Rewrite complex parts of PHP applications directly to C++ as PHP Extensions (for example through the Zend extension module)
• Gaining performance through the generated coded which uses static binding for functions and variables.
• Transforming PHP code directly in C++ which can then be turned in native machine code.