The influence that Facebook is having on the enterprise now goes beyond making the corporate world a more Web-oriented place – its impact now goes deep into the code.
Facebook announced this week that it has rewritten the PHP runtime, translating it to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This is no small feat. Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao said that the rewrite significantly reduced the CPU usage on its Web servers by an average of about 50% depending on the page …
Last time some websites reported that Facebook was planning to release a JIT compiler for PHP, a huge step toward making the PHP runtime – and PHP-based sites and apps – faster by taking the interpreted language (a.k.a., more human-readable code) a few steps closer to the bare-metal ones and zeros machines actually read.
We’ve been updated that the PHP runtime has in fact been rewritten, with an extra step: The PHP is translated to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This project, called HipHop, has been in development under great secrecy at Facebook for the past couple years and has just this morning been open sourced …
