High programming efficiency is the biggest feature of PHP language, but as a scripting language, there has always been the problem of low CPU and memory usage efficiency until the emergence of HipHop for PHP. Facebook’s mysterious PHP project HipHop for PHP has finally been unveiled. This project consists of a PHP to C++ conversion program, a reimplemented PHP runtime library, and rewritten versions of many commonly used PHP extensions, aiming to speed up and optimize PHP.
In the words of project leader Zhao Haiping (Graduate of Genetics and Molecular Biology from Peking University in 1987, Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton) on Facebook’s official blog (not directly accessible), the HipHop project has had a huge impact on Facebook. It currently supports 90% of Facebook's web traffic. Thanks to HipHop, CPU usage on Facebook's web servers has been reduced by an average of 50%, significantly reducing server demands. In order for this improvement to benefit the community, they decided to open source it, hoping to further help improve the scalability of more large and complex PHP websites.
Problems between PHP and Facebook
As we all know, Facebook’s front-end is mainly written in PHP. Zhao Haiping said that in the past six years, Facebook has gone from