Concocted by developers of Facebook, HipHop for PHP is an open project to convert the PHP code in C + +.
PHP is an interpreted language that runs server side. Widely used for web and praised for its simplicity, this show scripting language, like others similar, some limits of effectiveness in terms of CPU utilization on web servers. This is emphasized Haiping Zhao, engineer for Facebook, which has developed a tool for two years in the greatest secrecy.
HipHop for PHP is a source code translator that can convert PHP C + + optimized. Haiping Zhao says he is not a compiler, this burden is left to the discretion of g + + GNU. The conversion is so semantics, and optimization may also mean the sacrifice of some features of PHP, however, advertised as "rare".
With HipHop, Facebook would be reduced by 50% average CPU usage of its Web servers. The deployment of HipHop for Facebook date six months involved 90% of Web traffic. The social network serves more than 400 billion pages based on PHP, which are viewed per month.
HipHop The project is open source. It includes its own Web server and remains incompatible with Apache. In beta, HipHop supports PHP 5.2. Some improvements are needed and support for PHP 5.3.
HipHop will be posted on GitHub. For Web developers, more details are given in this note Facebook, where it is specified that there are already other ways to improve performance of PHP.
