David Ansermot Web Developer / TYPO3 Integrator

Facebook’s PHP rewrite : HipHop

The information has been officially confirmed by Facebook, a result of many rumors on the web which anticipated the announcement. He murmured here and there that a team of social network would have worked on a new build PHP JIT (Just In Time) which would speed increases up to 80%.The project would be quite similar to Google Unladen Swallow, which had involved a rewrite of the Python compiler.The project teams Facebook called HipHop and is available since this afternoon in open-source. The result of hard work and secret two long years.But contrary to what was expected, HipHop is actually a rewrite of the PHP runtime. The PHP source code is translated into C + + and compiled with g + +.An engineer who worked on the project, Haiping Zhao said: "With HipHop, we reduced the CPU usage on our web servers about 50%.This should help alleviate the datacenter Facebook.

"HipHop execute the source code of a semantic way and sacrificing some less used functions like eval () for better performance. HipHop we can correct the logic of the final assembly of a page in PHP." continued he.He concluded by stating that PHP and C + + share virtually the same syntax, but C + + is othing less system resources.