What worries me is the large list of 'unsupported PHP features': <a href="http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.unsupported.php" rel="nofollow">http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.unsupported.php</a> .<p>I know they can be considered bad practice, but in practice you use at at least a couple of them at least once in every project! And you use it because the alternative would be even uglier. (Also, what's the point in having a language with a separate namespace for functions and variables - Perl and Common Lisp being the only other ones I know of - if you can't at least have fun with variable variables and using a string directly as a function :) )<p>...also, they've "downgraded" PHP's closures mechanism. I mean, with:<p><pre><code> return function foo($a, $b) use ($outer1, $outer2) { ... }
</code></pre>
...PHP managed to do things better then all other dynamic languages - finally a way of being <i>explicit</i> about what variables from the outer scope you drag into a closure! The Hack guys totally missed the point - they've made everything stricter, but they relaxed this constraint and reverted one of the few good ideas in PHP.<p>Their VM may be awesome, but their language is horrid - they take away the "fun" features of PHP but <i>don't fix any of the bad language design issues.</i> It's like throwing away the baby and keeping the bath water - yeah, the water will keep you alive for a few more days in the desset, but the baby can actually be fun to play with.
So coincidentally I work at Facebook and know a bunch of these guys pretty well, but I don't actually interact with the Hack stuff at all (as I work in infrastructure doing flash and network stuff, primarily). I recently played around with the Open Source hack stuff and I installed it on my VPS.<p>Has anyone else played with Hack in a productionish environment? I'm just wondering what deployments and stuff are actually looking like in the world outside of Facebook.<p>p.s. tutorial that really exposed me to hack is here: <a href="http://hacklang.org/tutorial" rel="nofollow">http://hacklang.org/tutorial</a>
I noticed the other day that PHP has 30% code coverage. Is HHVM working to improve that (and pass the same tests, bug for bug) or is it relying on the unit tests of frameworks and packages?
What server can I use with HHVM to get the performance boost claimed in the video? Does it have a built in HTTP server?<p>Are there any benchmarks proving that HHVM improves performance?<p>Can I get a better performance than my current setup of Nginx + uWSGI + Flask ?
While the release names based on rappers is quite a fun idea, I don't get why they didn't go for people who are, you know, good at hip hop. I mean 50 cent and Childish Gambino? And especially next to Em and Ghostface. Or is this a good release/bad release kind of thing?