
HHVM is fast – too bad it doesn’t run my code - anu_gupta
http://www.hhvm.com/blog/?p=875
======
fosap
I don't see the point of HH. There are valid reasons to use php. IMO they are:
A existing codebase and the fact it is installed everywhere.

But HH is neither installed everywhere nor will the old codebase be
compatible. Why not use a proper language right from the start? There are tons
of alternatives that do not suffer from the shortcomings hh tries to fix.

~~~
RobAley
Er, surely the whole point of the article is that they are making it so that
more of the existing codebase will run.

Their roadmap also includes making it easy to install on Linux and other
platforms, so it may make inroads into "everywhere".

If they can even achieve the first objective, then people can continue with
the normal PHP runtime as usual in most places and switch to HHVM when they
need better performance.

Also, I find PHP a delight to program in. YMMV.

~~~
jeffasinger
Newer PHP isn't too bad to program in, so long as everyone who ever will need
to write a line of your code is relatively disciplined, and works to an agreed
upon standard.

However, your average codebase, written for PHP 5.0 or older, touched by many,
mostly incompetent people over several years, is usually incredibly painful to
work with.

~~~
debacle
I haven't seen a PHP codebase that didn't run on 5.2 in years. If you don't
support 5.2, that means your code is at least eight years old at this point,
with no effort at all to upgrade.

That's kind of scary. It'd be like captaining the SS Swiss Cheese.

~~~
andyhmltn
Sadly, I've seen companies that depend (like literally, if it were to fail the
company would shut down) on a codebase that is on 5.0 :(

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debacle
I'm really excited that Facebook is stewarding in a new era of PHP. I would
love it to see some of these framework maintainers (particularly fabpot and
jwage) push their frameworks towards interop with HHVM.

The sooner we can abandon the backwards php.internals mentality of "Do things
easy the easiest way possible," we'll see a much stronger language.

~~~
jcroll
Maybe HHVM will be like MariaDB and MySQL, HHVM will become the new fork and
the current stewardship will be left behind with their troll mailing list.
Either way I think HHVM is going to be a huge step forward for the PHP
ecosystem, it's going to kick up some dust and we'll see where everything lies
when it settles.

------
sambeau
So am I right in thinking that HPHPc is around 6x faster than Zend and HHVM so
far adds another 40%?

i.e. HHVM is currently 8x faster than Zend and still getting faster?

~~~
nolok
HHVM doesn't permit quite a few things that regular php allows, and it also
turns into outright errors "bad" things that regular php treats as warnings
because it thinks it can run despite it. I also don't think it supports
eval(), although it may have changed since the last time I read about it.

When you remove the "I don't know, maybe, maybe not" part, you can make you
code a lot more efficient.

(not making a judgment call here, just clearing things up on how it is
possible to be _that_ much faster)

~~~
elgenie
HPHPc, the static compilation version of the runtime, didn't support eval,
because eval is not static :) With the JIT compiler and VM, the runtime now
support eval and other more dynamic PHP features:

[https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-
php/blob/master/hphp/test...](https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-
php/blob/master/hphp/test/quick/eval.php)

------
Pxtl
So wait, you're telling me that Facebook's PHP interpreter moves fast and
breaks things?

~~~
jcroll
No just that HHVM doesn't yet support the entire PHP codebase

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johnx123-up
Not tried... but there's a way to get CakePHP run in HHVM
[http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/lorenzo/2012/01/30/runnin...](http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/lorenzo/2012/01/30/running_cakephp_using_the_facebooks_hiphop_compiler)

~~~
josegonzalez
I'm on the Cake Core team. We're moving towards a 3.x release, which will be
all PHP 5.4 compatible (namespaces, etc.) so the issue they point out in class
loading will be non-existent.

We are discussing aliasing the String class to a CakeText class, and then
deprecating the String class in a 2.5 release. If we had known this was an
issue[1], then it would likely have made it into the recent 2.4 release.

Something that would be nice would be to see the method in which they ran the
tests, so that we can include their testing into our TravisCI/Jenkins setup.
Probably would help other frameworks/packages as well. Will file a bug.

EDIT: Bug Filed: [https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-
php/issues/1054](https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/issues/1054)

[1]: They could and should have filed a bug. A cursory search of our
lighthouse issue tracker does not surface one, though admittedly lighthouse is
pretty shit, so it may indeed be there.

------
dkhenry
The biggest issue I have had with HHVM is that the extensions are totally
undocumented ( not like there is much for the Zend engine ). So trying to port
over extension to it is a excersize in futility.

~~~
debacle
Right now, I think documentation would be futile and also suffocating.
Considering the stability of HHVM and its steward (Facebook), I expect things
to break/change.

~~~
dkhenry
If they want wider adoption they will need to document extensions. There are
tons of extensions out there and I would say most non trivial installation use
at least a few of them.

~~~
debacle
I agree, I just don't think it's useful for them _right now_.

------
nasalgoat
We did some experiments with HHVM and discovered that our heavy reliance on
both redis and mongodb meant no HHVM for us - it supports neither of those
things.

If they could get php.ini support working, I'd be very pleased to leave php-
fpm behind.

------
Pxtl
phpBB sports zero. Hopefully this will encourage a migration away from that
mess and phpBB will end up on the dustbin of history. Please? Pretty-please?

Drupal's success is nice. I've run a Drupal site for a hobby project and
performance wasn't stellar, so it's nice to know that Drupal might run well on
HHVM.

~~~
jcroll
phpBB is being rebuilt using Symfony components

~~~
astrodust
phpBB, vBulletin, and the rest of them should be loaded up into a rocket and
fired into the sun.

Would it kill them to get someone to look over the UX of these things?
WordPress has a user interface that, while tricky, does make sense. These
"bulletin" products show their origins as some high-school kid's project to
make a website.

------
rmccue
I went to install HHVM to test my own code, but it turns out it's 64-bit only.
Kind of sucks.

~~~
q3k
Is there any valid reason to run 32-bit systems in 2013?

~~~
astrodust
You don't always get to choose your architecture. Sometimes it's dictated by
other concerns.

------
ksec
I wish there are a similar effort on Ruby VM.

------
oridecon
as long as I don't need to login on facebook to use it

------
programminggeek
I don't think the point of HHVM is to run things like phpbb. It is a tool for
Facebook to run their own stuff on as fast as possible.

~~~
lacksconfidence
? This blog post was written by the authors of HHVM, do you know something
they do not?

EDIT: I should add, the last time i talked with sgolemon she said (half
jokingly) that their goal is to replace zend (engine)

