Facebook Releases HHVM 3.30 As The Final Version Officially Supporting PHP

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Facebook Releases HHVM 3.30 As The Final Version Officially Supporting PHP

While Facebook's HHVM "HipHop Virtual Machine" project was born as a faster PHP implementation, with PHP7 offering significant upstream performance improvements and Facebook pursuing their own Hack programming language implementation with HHVM, the v3.3.0 release is the last release officially focusing on PHP language support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HHVM-3.30-Released

[Britoid]

Am I correct in that Hack never really took off?

[uid313]

Whats the point of Hack in the days of PHP 7?

[Guest]

Whats the point of Hack in the days of PHP 7?

Theoretically better type hinting but that's not reason enough for me to choose it over PHP 7.

[uid313]

Theoretically better type hinting but that's not reason enough for me to choose it over PHP 7.

Is that the only advantage of Hack over PHP?
Also PHP 7 does have type hinting too. How does the type hinting in Hack differ from the one in PHP and how is it better?

[Guest]

Is that the only advantage of Hack over PHP?
Also PHP 7 does have type hinting too. How does the type hinting in Hack differ from the one in PHP and how is it better?

That's the main advantage for me. It has a strong type system without having to declare(strict_types=1); PHP7 even with strong typing has some weird things like allowing NULL default values for typed parameters. Hack has the ? operator that explicitly declares the parameter nullable. It also has mixed type support and a really cool generic like way of type hinting collections. See here: https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/collections/introduction

That said, I'd still use PHP7 any day instead of Hack/HHVM because I don't like depending on one company.

[cybertraveler]

That's the main advantage for me. It has a strong type system without having to declare(strict_types=1); PHP7 even with strong typing has some weird things like allowing NULL default values for typed parameters. Hack has the ? operator that explicitly declares the parameter nullable. It also has mixed type support and a really cool generic like way of type hinting collections. See here: https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/collections/introduction

Do you think these Hack type-hinting features will get ported into a future version of PHP?

[caligula]

That said, I'd still use PHP7 any day instead of Hack/HHVM because I don't like depending on one company.

People use React too.

[stephen82]

That's the main advantage for me. It has a strong type system without having to declare(strict_types=1); PHP7 even with strong typing has some weird things like allowing NULL default values for typed parameters. Hack has the ? operator that explicitly declares the parameter nullable. It also has mixed type support and a really cool generic like way of type hinting collections. See here: https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/collections/introduction

That said, I'd still use PHP7 any day instead of Hack/HHVM because I don't like depending on one company.

PHP 7 since 7.1 has nullable types as well.

[Guest]

Do you think these Hack type-hinting features will get ported into a future version of PHP?

Definitely. As stephen82 pointed out, some of these features are already coming to PHP. I feel the whole version 7 was in a way inspired by HHVM.

I'd appreciate it if they also incorporated parts of the Hack Standard Library into PHP. There are at least efforts of making better data structures for PHP 7, so far as an extension.