Facebook released it's PHP to C++ compiler [0] in 2010. Maybe it was used internally before that. So they got pretty far from "normal PHP" relatively early. [

Facebook released it's PHP to C++ compiler [0] in 2010. Maybe it was used internally before that. So they got pretty far from "normal PHP" relatively early. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP