Facebook Releases 'HipHop for PHP'
By Dr. Dobb's Journal, February 04, 2010
An open source project that turns PHP source code into highly optimized C++
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HipHop for PHP is a Facebook open source project that turns PHP source code into highly optimized C++, then compiles it with g++ to build binary files. You keep coding in simpler PHP, then HipHop executes your source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features -- such as eval() -- in exchange for improved performance.
Facebook claims that it sees about a 50% reduction in CPU usage when serving equal amounts of Web traffic when compared to Apache and PHP. Facebook's API tier can serve twice the traffic using 30% less CPU.
