Following hot on the heels of our rap / hip hop post exhorting good design and coding for web sites via The Poetic Prophet’s rap, there is a different kind of hip hop out there on the web; as announced today by Facebook. HipHop is an open source code transformer that transforms PHP into C++ from PHP. HipHop forms part of Facebook’s increasing involvement with open source.
From the announcement:
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.
Facebook is delivering 90% of its Web traffic using HipHop transformed code (note that statement is not the same as 90% of Facebook is written in PHP and transformed using HipHop). This has reduced the load on Facebook’s servers by some 50%, and provided additional speed to the load of serving personalised pages to Facebook’s users.
Interesting, since the social software substrate in the Manchester PLE is currently implemented in PHP.
