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> Facebook was a PHP shop, so they worked on make it fast. Tangent: Facebook's work on PHP was largely a technical dead-end. Their work on HipHop and HHVM was
by duskwuff 5y ago
> Facebook was a PHP shop, so they worked on make it fast.
Tangent: Facebook's work on PHP was largely a technical dead-end. Their work on HipHop and HHVM was never accepted upstream, and eventually resulted in their forking PHP into a separate and incompatible language called Hack, which basically nobody uses outside of Facebook.
In the meantime, the upstream PHP project hasn't been standing still. The core development team has made a number of significant improvements to PHP performance. By 2015 or so, PHP 7.0 matched the performance of HHVM, and newer versions have improved upon that. (PHP 8.0 added a JIT compiler, for example, which can dramatically boost performance for some applications.)