Josh Lockhart
Facebook’s Hack, HHVM, and the future of PHP
What is Hack and what does it mean for the future of PHP?
Facebook recently released Hack, a new programming language that looks and acts like PHP. Underneath the hood, however, are a ton of features like static typing, generics, native collections, and many more features for which PHP developers have long been asking. Syntax aside, Hack is not PHP. Hack runs only on Facebook’s HipHop virtual machine (HHVM), a competitor to the traditional PHP Zend Engine.
Why did Facebook build Hack?
Much of Facebook’s internal code is first written with PHP. Facebook can onboard new developers quickly with PHP because the language is notoriously easy to learn and use. Granted, much of Facebook’s PHP code is likely converted to a C derivative before being pushed into production. The point is Facebook depends strongly on the PHP language to attract new talent and increase developer efficiency.
Strict Typing
Unfortunately, PHP may not perform as well as possible at Facebook’s scale. PHP is a loosely typed language and type-related errors may not be recognized until runtime. This means Facebook must write more tests early to enforce type checking, or spend more time refactoring runtime errors after launch. To solve this problem, Facebook added strict typing and runtime-enforcement of return types to Hack. Strict typing nullifies the need for a lot of type-related unit tests and encourages developers to catch type-related errors sooner in the development process.
Instantaneous Type Checking
To make the development process and error-catching process even easier, Facebook includes a type-checking server with its HHVM engine. This server runs locally and monitors Hack code as it is written. Developers’ code editors and IDEs can use this type-checking server to immediately report syntax or type-related errors during code development.
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The new PHP
PHP's experiencing a renaissance, with improvements and new standards
The programming language many love to hate is experiencing a renaissance. This is not your parents’ PHP. The new PHP is a more mature language with community standards, a growing affinity for interoperable components, and a passionate movement to improve performance. If you have bypassed PHP for alternative languages, or if you are a PHP veteran unaware of recent changes, you owe it to yourself to give PHP a second look.
Language Features
PHP 5.5 (the latest stable build as of this writing) has made major progress from earlier versions. Recent PHP releases contain powerful new features and helpful developer tools, such as a built-in web server, generators for simpler iteration, and namespaces. With PHP 5.4, traits were introduced (a la Scala or Perl) to allow code reuse in single inheritance languages, as well as closures, which allow you to code PHP in a functional style. Other important features include the built-in FastCGI process manager and phpdbg debugger, and a new password hashing API that makes it easy to hash and securely manage passwords in PHP.