Facebook’s custom PHP compiler was supposed to have been released by now, but according to a forum post today, it’s at least a few days out.
“We really wanted to have it out by now, but have run into some build/compilation issues when removing certain Facebook-specific extensions,” reports Facebook’s Scott MacVicar.
After rumors buzzed across blogs about a Facebook PHP compiler in the works, they officially announced HipHop on Feb. 2. They’re calling it HipHop for PHP: a source code transformer.
“HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself,” described Facebook Senior Server Enginer Haiping Zhao last week. “Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance.”
Where’s the source code?
“Within the next few days (and maybe even sooner) we’ll release an initial copy of the source code that you can build on CentOS,” MacVicor said today.
