
HHVM 4.0.0 - marksamman
https://hhvm.com/blog/2019/02/11/hhvm-4.0.0.html
======
pushtheenvelope
A lot of the narrative on HN seems to be that PHP7 has adopted most of the
benefits of HHVM (performance) and Hack (typehints).

If you read this blog post closely, you will notice several interesting points
in the Future Changes, which hint at making Hack a significantly saner
language than PHP, especially around type-soundness.

> Several behaviors will be removed from PHP arrays; the general principle is
> that PHP arrays should work as “vec or dict”.

> Int-like string keys will not be converted to integers.

> Binding references to array elements will not be permitted.

> The values null, false, or uninitialized variables will not be able to be
> treated as arrays.

> Empty strings will not be able to be treated as arrays.

> Arrays will not be able to be compared to non-arrays.

> Non-arraykey values will not be able to be used as array keys and will not
> be automatically coerced.

> Arrays will not be able to be used with the plus (+) operator.

This is a massive change that goes a long way towards making the most
prominent, core data structure of any php codebase be sound.

Other examples of introducing type soundness:

> Undefined constants will no longer be converted to strings

> ints will wrap in future releases, instead of being converted to floats,
> allowing the type of int + int to be int, instead of int + int = num.

~~~
wink
I'm not sure anyone is debating that in the terms of PHP7 vs HHVM. Hack has
been a different language for quite some time and that is exactly the problem.
The more it diverged from PHP the less sense it made for most people to go
that direction.

Also on a personal level I'm really not sure why anyone would want to go that
direction. Of all the problems people usually say they have with PHP, just
fixing the type system is not even close to #1. If Hack then really is a
different language and you don't like PHP, why not migrate to something
completely different?

~~~
pushtheenvelope
> If Hack then really is a different language and you don't like PHP, why not
> migrate to something completely different?

For server-side web programming, what shall one adopt?

Python and Ruby are great dynamically-typed languages, with rich ecosystems,
but don't have any type system. This makes maintenance, and evolution of the
codebase, tricky in the long run.

For languages that do have type-systems: Go's is a bit too simplistic, while
Java/Scala have robust type systems but are rather slow and don't hit the
programmer workflow sweet spot.

There's no silver bullet around.

~~~
luuio
TypeScript? Python 3 with type hint? .NET core?

------
jacobwg
> We are currently working to move to a package manager that fully supports
> multiple languages.

I wonder if this is related to the plans to add a pluggable architecture to
Yarn 2.0 and support languages other than JavaScript.

[https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/6953](https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/6953)

------
johnmaguire2013
> With this release, we no longer aim to be compatible with PHP.

Looks like a big release! I'm curious -- is anyone actually using HHVM, either
in production or for personal use?

~~~
Gaelan
Wikipedia was (but is moving off now).

~~~
jey
What are they moving to?

~~~
KenanSulayman
Plain PHP (php7). As of now they're still on HHVM though:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version).

