To paraphrase
Marco Tabini if you work with PHP you must be doing so in a pretty deep cave to have not heard of
HipHop for PHP and the fervor around it the prior to its official announcement this morning by Facebook.
I had a fortune to be part of the small group of PHP community people who were invited to take a peak at its technology prior to its official release in January. And I must admit it had been quite amusing to read some of the
conjectures people were making about what it actually, given how off the mark most of their guesses were.
So what is HipHop?
In the tersest of terms HipHop is a tool that converts PHP code into C++ code that when combined with a PHP compatible engine and extensions (ports of some native PHP extensions Facebook uses) library also written in C++ can be compiled using GCC into a binary. This binary can then be ran on a command line or as a web server daemon that utilizes
libevent. According to Facebook this can speed up applications by up to 50%, which is a pretty impressive improvement.
It is not entirely surprising that world's largest PHP deployment, such as Facebook would look at solution that would allow them to halve their not inconsiderable count of servers or double capacity. Releasing this solution as Open Source is I think a great idea, and big kudos to Facebook for doing so.
From a technical perspective the PHP optimization approach of converting PHP into a compiled language is not a completely new one,
Roadsend compiler, a commercial product has been around for a few years now and has been doing that with some degree of success. That said it is not a trivial task and from an engineering perspective presents a fairly tricky development challenge, especially when you want to allow regular, off-the-self scripts to work. Perhaps more importantly, HipHop not a theoretical solution, "for you to test", it actually works, with most of the Facebook's servers running it and doing it well, on millions of lines of converted PHP code on daily basis, very impressive.
At this point you are probably thinking, that if it is so great and it works, I'll deploy it on my servers as soon as I can get my hands on the source code. Well, unfortunately things are not quite so simple, there are few technical and deployment challenges you need to overcome.
Continue reading "My Thoughts on HipHop "
