kPHP doesn't support all of the PHP features - there is no OOP for example. They claim [0] though that kPHP is faster than its competitors. Unfortunately, it seems the documentation is currently available only in Russian.<p>[0] - <a href="http://habrahabr.ru/company/vkontakte/blog/214877/" rel="nofollow">http://habrahabr.ru/company/vkontakte/blog/214877/</a> (it's in Russian, I used Google Translate)
This is awesome, I was considering applying to vk.com because they seem to be a very good and open house based in St. Petersburg.<p>I know it's where Snowden went to work too, and they're the ones behind Telegram.<p>it's interesting how much I've heard about them since I started dating a Russian girl... but, yes, good things.
Facebook's HHVM (HipHop VM) compiles webpages into native machine code that can be executed directly on the processor. People often confuse HHVM with HPHPc, also made by Facebook. HPHPc came first; it was a converter that converted all the PHP files in a folder into individual C++ files. In other words, you would end up uploading the C++ files to the server, not PHP files. Facebook abandoned HPHPc early on for multiple reasons (it was actually developed by a single developer as a tool for one-time use to convert all of Facebook's existing PHP files into C++, back when Facebook was considering rewriting the website in C++ for improving performance). While the idea for HHVM was loosely based on HPHPc, the approach is much different. HHVM is a standalone replacement for the PHP engine. It has almost 100% support with the native PHP language, up to PHP 5.5, and even (intentionally) reproduces the various bugs in the PHP language, to maintain compatibility. HHVM only replaces PHP, not Apache or anything else in your stack. It is really, really easy to replace it via their FastCGI handler.
Sounds like HipHop, Facebook's PHP->C++ translator.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP</a><p>Anyone know how they compare?
Of all this code, storage should probably be most interesting to outsiders given how fast, reliable and synchronous vk.com is. I've heard they do crazy things with data storage.<p>I wonder if someone would step up, figure it out and tell the world.
While there is indeed some PHP accelerator code, most of what is open-sourced is piles of domain-specific C code they use _instead_ of PHP, which I find to be an interesting approach.