For some time now, a single developer at Facebook has been rebuilding PHP from the ground-up. It illustrates the quality of engineers that work at Facebook and this specific project is something that many Facebook employees are extremely proud of. Over the weekend, the SDTimes suggested that Facebook will officially announce their latest open-source project: a new PHP compiler (referenced off the record as “Hyper PHP” or “HPHP”).
While we don’t have confirmation that the announcement will come on Tuesday, we do know that the company has rebuilt PHP entirely, as told by some of the company’s employees. As soon as it’s launched, it will instantly change the entire PHP landscape. With greater efficiency, many developers will begin tinkering immediately and most likely make the entire shift over to this new version of PHP.
Yes, for the basic developer, PHP as it exists today is relatively sufficient. What I’m personally interested in learning about is whether or not there is new functionality within the language (such as the ability to develop threaded applications) or if it will simply be a compiled language that makes code writing more efficient and run-time even more efficient.
Whatever the announcement is and whenever it will be, Facebook has most definitely made some huge strides when it comes to supporting the development community. With multiple open-source projects, developers now have the ability to build real-time, highly scalable applications, learning from one of the largest sites in the world.
I expect it will be full of bugs sadly
Comment by Linto — February 1, 2010 @ 6:20 am
Wow. Don't even reference the site that broke this yesterday.
Comment by Bob — February 1, 2010 @ 7:18 am
I'm now creating my first site with php, but I'm really curious what a great service such as facebook can do with an already very powerful language.
Comment by Frederik — February 1, 2010 @ 10:45 am
Can't wait!
Comment by MIkey — February 1, 2010 @ 2:14 pm
This is just another rubbish from facebook.
Comment by Freshtuts — February 2, 2010 @ 2:16 am
I still wonder why would anyone (besides amateurs) would ever create anything on PHP. After all PHP = (Pretty Home Page) and thats it … buggy, leaky and solid as rock when it comes to security. A big applause to facebook for promoting BS to the new era of computing.
Comment by Dimitris — February 2, 2010 @ 7:36 am
"Yes, for the basic developer, PHP as it exists today is relatively sufficient."
Y'think…?? Talk about condemn by faint praise! Yes, I'd say that today's PHP is sufficient for 98.3 percent of developers. The others work for huge, super-scaled, navel-picking sites like facebook.
Comment by dave — February 2, 2010 @ 7:48 am
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the mainstream PHP developers to integrate any of the changes. Although frankly I'm sure Facebook devs will do a better job than the PHP devs as they are constantly doing stupid things like removing ereg (dead as of PHP 5.3), and preparing to remove short open tags (as of PHP 6 apparently which will kill probably 30% of all apps out there)….
Comment by Daryl Quenet — February 2, 2010 @ 9:36 am
Good post! Sorry to say can't say the same for most parts of the comments though. Seriously wft (Dave excluded).
And be glad that old deprecated stuff is removed from newer releases of PHP. It prevents it from growing in to something evil and un-efficient… You still have to do a sanity when upgrading from one major version to the next.
Comment by Patrick Gilmore — February 2, 2010 @ 11:06 pm