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HHVM is one of the things that is making PHP obsolete. You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore. It does not work!! PERIOD! Facebook

HHVM is one of the things that is making PHP obsolete. You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore. It does not work!! PERIOD! Facebook realized this and solved the problem by building a proper platform to run a subset of PHP which allowed them an easy migration to the new platform. Massive companies can afford to do this, but the rest of use need to choose safer tools with a long future ahead of them.

giaour 11y ago
You're confusing the Hack language (the "subset" of PHP Facebook uses -- actually a superset, as all PHP is valid Hack) with HHVM, which is a PHP runtime engine. Wikipedia recently transitioned their PHP website from running on the Zend engine to running on HHVM. It's still regular PHP code, though.
ChrisCinelli 11y ago
"You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore" - I guess you mean ONLY on PHP. Maybe Facebook is not using just PHP... Twitter and Slideshare demonstrated that you cannot run their businesses exclusively with Ruby on Rail. Pinterest and Quora have done the same with Python. At a certain scale, it is more economical and efficient to optimize part of your architecture with services written in other languages. This has always be true. People has massively relay on caches that are usually written C/C++ Ex: memcache is a very tiny piece of C has been used with PHP, Python, Ruby forever. However you would be surprised to know how many million dollar businesses are running almost exclusively on PHP. I am not saying that is the best choice, but it is the reality.