HHVM is a completely new interpreter, so it has nothing to do with the Zend interpreter's performance. That said, PHP is (and has been) faster than both Ruby a

HHVM is a completely new interpreter, so it has nothing to do with the Zend interpreter's performance. That said, PHP is (and has been) faster than both Ruby and Python and does some things faster than Perl. It shouldn't be expected to compete with Java or Go.