HipHop released as open source
HipHop released as open source
V3.co.uk,
03 Feb 2010
Facebook has said it has built a new PHP
platform, dubbed HipHop, which
drastically increases the speed and scalability of its systems.
In a post on the Facebook developers blog senior engineer Haiping Zhao said that the company had spent the last two years on HipHop and as a result have halved the processor load of running web pages.
In a post on the Facebook developers blog senior engineer Haiping Zhao said that the company had spent the last two years on HipHop and as a result have halved the processor load of running web pages.
“Overall HipHop allows us to keep the best
aspects of PHP while taking
advantage of the performance benefits of C++,” he said.
“In total, we have written over 300,000 lines of code and more than 5,000 unit tests. All of this will be released this evening on GitHub under the open source PHP license.”
HipHop translates PHP source code into C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. As C++ is much faster and more efficient at handling code the whole system has a much lower overhead.
Facebook has also developed an interpreter called HPHPi which frees PHP developers from compiling code before running it. Zhao said that this had helped Facebook engineers find bugs and keep writing code in their usual style.
“In total, we have written over 300,000 lines of code and more than 5,000 unit tests. All of this will be released this evening on GitHub under the open source PHP license.”
HipHop translates PHP source code into C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. As C++ is much faster and more efficient at handling code the whole system has a much lower overhead.
Facebook has also developed an interpreter called HPHPi which frees PHP developers from compiling code before running it. Zhao said that this had helped Facebook engineers find bugs and keep writing code in their usual style.
The company is now running more than 90
per cent of its productions server
operations using HipHop and is hoping that the system gets other high
profile
users.
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