Facebook Announces HipHop for PHP

Feb 3, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Coding 2 Comments

PHP is my favorite server-side programming language, but it has one major Achilles’ heel: speed. A language that is interpreted by the server at load time can’t hope to compete with a compiled language for speed. That’s what Facebook’s new project, “HipHop for PHP,” aims to solve. HipHop converts PHP scripts to C++ code and then uses g++ to compile it. This brings a CPU usage decrease of up to 50%, according to the announcement.

One night at a Hackathon a few years ago (see Prime Time Hack), I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage. Even PHP itself is written in C. We knew that it was impossible to successfully rewrite an entire codebase of this size by hand, but wondered what would happen if we built a system to do it programmatically.

Interesting, for sure. Imagine using it with WordPress for a high-traffic blog…

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast [Facebook Developer Blog]

Change Firefox 3.6’s Tab Behavior

Feb 2

Firefox 3.6 was released at the end of last month, bringing with it speed and RAM usage improvements and the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. However, it also brought a small UI change that some people may not like. When opening opening a link in…

Using Symbolic Links to Backup Your Files to Dropbox

Feb 1

Dropbox is an excellent little service that I’ve written about on more than one occasion. It’s a nice off-site backup tool, as well as easy way to keep data synced between multiple computers. I imagine it would be nice to get one of their…

BlogBuzz January 30, 2010

Jan 30

The iPad Will Find its Niche: My Thoughts on Apple’s Tablet

Jan 29

Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, you’ve almost certainly heard about Apple’s new iPad tablet. The $499 device is essentially a giant iPod Touch, but with a few additional features. The integrated ebook store (or iBooks, as Apple prefers to call them…)…

Is Firefox Losing its Focus?

Jan 28

Firefox is a great web browser, certainly the most extendable. In the beginning, one of Firefox’s strong points was how lightweight it was. It wasn’t full of extraneous features, it was pretty snappy. It did one thing, web browsing, and it did it well.…

The History of the Emoticon

Jan 27

Have you ever wondered where the ASCII “smiley face,” and the later emoticons, came from? It was first used on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board in the early 1980s, September 19, 1982 to be exact. The motivation behind the symbol was to devise a…

An API for the Web: Learning YQL

Jan 26

I just read one of the most interesting articles Net.Tuts+ has published in the last few months: An API for the Web: Learning YQL. Web apps and web services multiply like rabbits. They’re all fun to play with (like rabbits) and fun to integrate…

WordPress Category Templates + Custom Taxonomies

Jan 25

Here’s a part of WordPress that many people overlook: Category Templates. It’s actually quite easy to set up your theme so that it adapts to the content being displayed, allowing you to set up “departments” or “sub sites” that are styled differently. This isn’t…

BlogBuzz January 23, 2010

Jan 23