ReadWriteWeb

Facebook is announcing a new execution engine for PHP in order to try to boost performance. Facebook introduced HipHop for PHP nearly two years ago. Today the company announced a new tool in the HipHop toolbox, which it claims is 60% faster, with a 90% reduction in memory cost.

Facebook engineer Jason Evans writes that the company put together a team last year to replace the HipHop interpreter (HPHPi). Today they're taking the lid off of the new HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which will replace HPHPi and eventually be used in production.

Last week, we were chasing our tails in giddiness over HipHop, a newly open-sourced PHP runtime developed in house at Facebook.

Today, amid the rabid excitement over Google Buzz, Facebook quietly pumped some more code into the world. XHP is a new way to write PHP that "augments the syntax of the language to both make your front-end code easier to understand and help you avoid cross-site scripting attacks," according to Facebook engineer Marcel Laverdet. "XHP has enabled us to build better websites faster; our Lite site was written entirely with XHP."

Here's what a few developers, including PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, had to say about it.

The big news of the week was Facebook getting faster - read on for our extensive coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web, Internet of Things and Augmented Reality.

New! We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

The influence that Facebook is having on the enterprise now goes beyond making the corporate world a more Web-oriented place - its impact now goes deep into the code.

Facebook announced this week that it has rewritten the PHP runtime, translating it to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This is no small feat. Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao said that the rewrite significantly reduced the CPU usage on its Web servers by an average of about 50% depending on the page

The impact of this development on the enterprise will depend on a few factors:

Earlier this week, we pinged PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf about the implications of HipHop, the new PHP runtime that Facebook just open-sourced.

Using ReadWriteWeb as an example, he goes into great detail about how speeding up PHP isn't simply a matter of finding a single magic bullet. Lerdorf contends that true optimization comes down to attacking the mundane inefficiencies that sneak into sites of all sizes - even suggesting free tools for PHP devs to use - before a solution such as HipHop is considered.

So, Facebook went and secretly rewrote PHP's runtime to be a lean, mean, C++ translated, g++ compiled piece of resource-friendly hotness.

If that sentence confused you, then you're not the target audience for this post. We want to know what our developer friends think of HipHop, the latest open-source code project to emerge from the deep, dark dungeons of Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters (ok, the HQ's actually quite pretty, but we like a good turn of phrase). Read these expert opinions (and by "expert," we mean Rasmus Lerdorf), and let us know in the comments what you think of the new PHP runtime.

Last night, we reported that Facebook was planning to release a JIT compiler for PHP, a huge step toward making the PHP runtime - and PHP-based sites and apps - faster by taking the interpreted lagnuage (a.k.a., more human-readable code) a few steps closer to the bare-metal ones and zeros machines actually read.

We've been updated this morning that the PHP runtime has in fact been rewritten, with an extra step: The PHP is translated to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This project, called HipHop, has been in development under great secrecy at Facebook for the past couple years and has just this morning been open sourced.

The rumors have been flying over what's going on over at Facebook headquarters. The word has been that a PHP team was brought in and made to sign non-disclosure agreements before discussing a PHP project that has been in development for the past two years. Alex Handy, senior editor of the Software Development Times Blog, predicted last Saturday that Facebook "has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch," and several sources have confirmed for us tonight that Facebook has indeed been making some changes to the basic PHP runtime environment.

According to our sources, Facebook has been working on a PHP compiler that will
increase speed by around 80% and offer a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that will offer a number of advantages. The project is very similar to Google's Unladen Swallow project, which rebuilt the Python compiler, boosting the speed fivefold and opening the door for multi-language integration.