HHVM is an amazingly-optimized VM for their workload. That PHP runs many times faster than off-the-shelf PHP does. I suspect taking any other widely available V

HHVM is an amazingly-optimized VM for their workload. That PHP runs many times faster than off-the-shelf PHP does. I suspect taking any other widely available VM and waving a magic wand to rewrite in another language would result in something that performed significantly worse.