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It was technically motivated: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-for-php--move-fast/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02

by CCs 13y ago

It was technically motivated: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-for-php--move-fast/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-... https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/folly-the-facebook-open-source-library/10150864656793920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/folly-th... Edit: From the 1st link "[...] I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage."

betterunix 13y ago
It sounds to me like they wrote a PHP compiler that leverages GCC's optimizer. I am not seeing the technical motivation to use C++ for that; it would have been just as good to just produce GIMPLE. It looks like C++ was just chosen because it is what the developers knew, which is not all that far off from what I said. (Edit: it is also worth pointing out that the motivation for this tool is to avoid having to write C++ code)