Is Facebook’s HHVM Building PHP’s Coffin?

English: THIS IS SPARTA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With HHVM 3.0 now released, it’s probably time to start talking about HHVM and the new Hack Language. It’s becoming hard to ignore some of the fantastical notions spreading on the grapevine about HHVM. There is talk of significant performance improvements, a multitude of new features courtesy of Hack, that PHP Internals is actually now outnumbered by HHVM contributors. There is even treasonous talk of PHP’s Zend Engine being put out to pasture.

Perhaps worse, HHVM 3.0 is following in 2.0′s steps: It is steadily eroding away at the notion that Facebook is going to abandon HHVM tomorrow (specifically at tea time once Mark has finished his crumpets) and it’s reinforcing the notion that Facebook actually wants people to adopt HHVM…as if running framework test suites and blogging about PHP parity every other day didn’t clue you in. Before 2.0, you’d swear the whole project was either top secret or had been disavowed.

This Was Inevitable…

PHP is not the only language to have faced multiple implementations. Ruby MRI (Matz’s Ruby Interpreter) is the “original” Ruby. It now puts up with JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby, MagLev and MacRuby (where would we be without an Objective-C option, right?). Python is also not alone. It has alternatives (a lot of them) but you’d most likely recognise IronPython, PyPy, and Jython.

PHP is merely doing what it does best – creeping up on other languages and stealthily “borrowing” the best of their advantages. This time it’s not actually PHP doing the creeping, however, and beating PHP at the catchup game is a big deal. Just in case you haven’t heard – even HHVM is hardly the only option for PHP either. You can use Zephir to write PHP-like code which compiles to a PHP extension. Recently, I heard about HippyVM which appears to be in its infancy though those kids can grow up very fast (and it’s association with PyPy means it can’t be dismissed out of hand). There’s also the penultimate “opt-out” options for converting PHP out to Java, for example. The ultimate option being to just maintain the output and dump PHP altogether. Never overestimate your PHP code’s permanence .

I haven’t really discussed HHVM anywhere because the equation Facebook presented us with just didn’t add up for my particular circumstances. Now it does. HHVM is becoming ever more compelling as the weeks roll by. The PHP parity quest, the Hack Language, the shift to FastCGI and, most importantly, HHVM’s rapid improvement over time are creating something extremely attractive. Yes, it performs really well, but that’s not always the most relevant factor to programmers on the ground churning out everyday applications.

To PHP or not to PHP?

I’m seriously thinking about using the damn thing! This poses one small troubling question which keeps gnawing away at my poor brain: What is PHP?

PHP is a language without a specification to define all of its behaviour. It exists as one implem

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 6785 bytes)

more