Facebook and Hyper-PHP
Jan 14

Facebook and Hyper-PHP

Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee : This is a wide-ranging interview with an anonymous Facebook employee, which is very interesting in itself, but particularly for this bit about their infrastructure.

Our site is coded, I’d say, 90% in PHP. All the front end — everything you see — is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he’s literally rewriting the entire language. […] So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language.

I couldn’t find any reference to Hyper-PHP anywhere, so I’m assuming it’s a Facebook-only thing.  Some pre-compiled derivation of PHP.

by Deane   January 14, 2010 7:01 AM    |   Follow Gadgetopia on Twitter

Comments

by Azeroth,   January 14, 2010 7:56 AM  

I find the idea intriguing and although I have no hopes Facebook will make this public and open source, maybe someone will take the idea and start a new project.

by Oscar M.,   January 14, 2010 8:59 AM  

Isn't this why PHP supports extensions? So that you could move bottle neck code into compiled extensions that make functions available?

by duryodhan,   January 14, 2010 12:13 PM  

you should google around .. most people think that interview is a fake

by Nicolas,   January 17, 2010 2:13 PM  

Come on, Hyper-PHP is crap. Consider APC or eAccelerator!

by Abraham Williams,   January 19, 2010 1:31 PM  

Facebook has made several of their projects open source so hopefully if HPHP is real they will open it as well.

by Andrej Vol?anšek,   January 2, 2011 5:08 PM  

I think that she was talking about OO PHP. This would mean that FB was a procedural PHP and they wil rewrite it into object otiented approach. In other words, someone will do a code cleanup.

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