keif's posterous

For some time now, a single developer at Facebook has been rebuilding PHP from the ground-up. It illustrates the quality of engineers that work at Facebook and this specific project is something that many Facebook employees are extremely proud of. Over the weekend, the SDTimes suggested that Facebook will officially announce their latest open-source project: a new PHP compiler (referenced off the record as “Hyper PHP” or “HPHP”).

While we don’t have confirmation that the announcement will come on Tuesday, we do know that the company has rebuilt PHP entirely, as told by some of the company’s employees. As soon as it’s launched, it will instantly change the entire PHP landscape. With greater efficiency, many developers will begin tinkering immediately and most likely make the entire shift over to this new version of PHP.

Yes, for the basic developer, PHP as it exists today is relatively sufficient. What I’m personally interested in learning about is whether or not there is new functionality within the language (such as the ability to develop threaded applications) or if it will simply be a compiled language that makes code writing more efficient and run-time even more efficient.

Whatever the announcement is and whenever it will be, Facebook has most definitely made some huge strides when it comes to supporting the development community. With multiple open-source projects, developers now have the ability to build real-time, highly scalable applications, learning from one of the largest sites in the world.

I'm looking forward to this - it's always irked me that PHP has been treated poorly in terms of "not being Java/.net" and this movement from Facebook could really change the perception of PHP - I mean, it RUNS facebook, and their (awesome? talented?) engineer(s) rebuilt the platform, used it extensively, contribute to OSS like crazy.

I mean, say what you will about Zuckerberg/the privacy issues, but the kind of shit they do? I'd love to work at Facebook. Sounds like an awesome group of developers.