HipHop for PHP

For those who haven't heard, Facebook (believe it or not) announced they
are going to open source a product called HipHip for PHP. Here is part of
the announcement to show why you should care:

<snip>
Today Iâm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I
have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop
weâve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty
percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means
less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We
feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as
open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling
large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible
results, itâs certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with
beta software before trying it out.

HipHop for PHP isnât technically a compiler itself. 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 â such as eval() â in exchange for improved
performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of
PHPâs runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take
advantage of these performance optimizations.
</snip>

While reducing number of servers is irrelevant to us IBM i folks, better
performance certainly is not. I get excited at the idea of PHP running at
native speeds. This is an incredibly interesting idea and probably relevant
to every IBM i shop using PHP. I sure hope Zend is paying attention to
this. I'd love to see some real world examples of how much of an impact
this can actually have on performance. If it is as significant the
announcement says, I expect to see HipHop eventually implemented into a
future release of Zend Server. ;)

Matt