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Facebook and PHP’s new virtual machine

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The good old PHP sees new light.This time it is none other than the king of Social networking – Facebook which isrevamping its PHP virtual machine. This claims to vastly improve programming speeds.

Going by the words of Joel Pobar, an engineering manager at Facebook says “Our goal is to make PHP run really, really quickly”. Indeed that seems to be a huge goal as the new PHP Virtual Machine’s speed is now at the least 9 times faster than the original. It is also 2 times as fast as its predecessor.The new virtual machine is being named as HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM).

Facebook is not new in making PHP development better. HipHop is a compiler that they made to translate PHP codes to C++ that gave a much higher performance. As time progressed, the need for higher performance crept in and that gave them the idea of HHVM. It has a just-in-time compiler that enables the virtual machine to “make smarter decisions at runtime” according to Joel. It is principally similar to Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Like say while making a call to the database to read a cluster of data, the HHVM detects the type and can also undergo exception handling if need be. This happens on the fly, while in the previous version “the best it can do is analyze the entire Facebook codebase, reason about it and then specialize code based on its reasoning. But it can’t get all of the reasoning right. There are parts of the code base that you cannot simply infer about or reason about,” Pobarhas said.

Pobar goes on to claim that standard WordPress blog sites would get a 500 percent boost in performance by adopting the new virtual machine. The code has been available on GitHub and some users have reported a great deal in performance enhancement too.

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