This keep coming up again and again.<p>As a PHP perf guy for serveral years, I have some weird questions to ask.<p>Is this an HTTP serving language VM or just a PHP as a language VM?<p>Because I spent years fixing the first part without ever really doing anything about the second part of that question.<p>If it can't listen on port 80, my interest drops a lot in the new VM - I'm not going to write scipy/numba.py problems in PHP, even if I could.
Very cool that this uses the PyPy toolchain, I hope this becomes a trend because it means we have one make-dynamic-languages-fast effort that will pay dividends across multiple languages.
I would like to mention my (just released) PHP preprocessor here, since it has a feature that suggests a number of micro-optimizations. People seem to care so much about performance, so why not spend a few minutes to improve source code in the first place?<p>I wrote about the PHPippo PHP preprocessor a few hours ago, though it went through HN unnoticed (so far):
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861616" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861616</a>
As someone with a bit of experience scaling PHP, it seems to me that the main problem with the language is not its raw performance (which seems on a par with its more cousins Python and Ruby) but rather its <i></i>single-request model<i></i>. For every request, mod_php creates a new interpreter, which has to do all the work to set up the framework, auto-loading the required classes, reading additional data every time. What's more, the request has to create a new database connection for every request; the single-request model doesn't allow the use of a database pool. (This doesn't change fundamentally with handlers other than mod_php, such as php-fpm.)<p>With languages like Python and Ruby, not to mention Java, a single interpreter process or thread can handle many requests and can re-use the database connection. In PHP, you're forced to do all the set-up all over again for every request. This is particularly wasteful with frameworks like Laravel, which do a non-trivial amount of work for setting up the application object, IoC controller.<p>Am I missing something here? I can't believe companies using PHP on a larger scale, like Facebook, discard and re-create the application environment and all DB connections (!) for every single request.
I wonder what the claimed and "aimed for" compatibility with Zend is actually like. How much of the standard library is implemented? How about common extensions? Is the casting behaviour the same?<p>Performance is meaningless if your VM can't run people's code.
Does the word "hip" mean something in the context of PHP?<p>edit: I mean, is there a reason HHVM and HippyVM both use the word "Hip"?
I'm not really familiar with the PyPy tooling and capabilities, but if this takes of, will there be a possibility of interop between RPython language implementations? It would be mind blowing to be able to write libs in different languages and have them working together.
We could always use the best one available regardless of the language.<p>They mention interop with Python code, but I was just wondering if this could go a bit further...
I got HHVM running wordpress on a relatively high traffic site. The difference is night and day and setup was simple. To have something faster is crazy :)
For those that can't find the repository, it can be found here on github <a href="https://github.com/hippyvm/hippyvm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hippyvm/hippyvm</a> I can never seem to find the link to github from the hippyvm page. It doesn't seem to be very active as far as emerging technology goes, but in my opinion it has good potential since it can build off existing language development tools that are continuously improving.
The code look clear, even to me.<p>Also: Look like it have a debugger! That is something I was looking how do. Plus, bytecode (look clean) too.<p>RPython could output to ARM?
>It started off as a research project [...] for Facebook<p>Huh? Isn't that what HipHop is? Can someone elaborate on the matter? Is this a fork? Why aren't they just migrating their work back to HipHop, I mean all this leads to is fragmentation.
haha jokes... well I see why fb wanted to create their own framework since the whole site is in php and it would take em a lot of time to translate it something else (i think most nowadays is JS anyways) but srsly, why people are trying to make faster frameworks for php ... no idea. It doesn't get any faster due its design. At least join one of the open source projects and help that.<p>Combine all those working on those open source frameworks for years and all together create something fast...
I'm a developer and PHP is in my toolbox when suitable. But the thing I can't understand is... why waste all this effort to make a slow, broken language fast, instead of using a faster language?<p>I mean, sure, it's impressive that this VM is 7 times faster than stock PHP, but Java is over 100 times faster than stock PHP.<p>What is the gain here? Not having to go out of you little shell and learn a new language?
Seems like an odd way to show off a technology boasting speed when it's cracking under the load. Can anyone confirm if it's running on hippyvm?