Facebook Releases HHVM 4.0 With PHP No Longer Supported

[Mateus Felipe]

What advantages does Hack have over PHP nowadays?

Performance-wise, not much nowadays. However, lang-wise, Hack is ways sanier than PHP lang.

Does Facebook themselves even want to use Hack? [...] It seems nobody outside Facebook is really using Hack so why are they pursuing it?

Don't know if they want, but it emerged as a necessity. As PHP is hardly a sane language, specially considering a hugiant codebase as Facebook. Facebook has been written initially in PHP because (1) in the time there was not many alternatives and (2) it was a really simple social network used internally on a university, so it had a simple and small codebase. As Facebook expanded to all the world with increasing load and requirement, PHP started to be a problem. Surely it would be overweightening to simply rewrite all the code in another lang. So they opted to slowly and gradually transition to something better by making a PHP-compatible language.

Wouldn't Facebook rather want to use something else like Go, Kotlin, C# or Python?

Surely, Facebook don't use only Hack. According to Wikipedia (don't know the level of reliability, but the reality shouldn't be much different), Facebook uses Hack, PHP (HHVM), Python, C++, Java, Erlang, D, XHP, Haskell on the back-end. The truth is that general-purpose languages are things of the past, and each lang excel more in one aspect than the other, so a big organization as Facebook has to know what to use where.

[uid313]

What advantages does Hack have over PHP nowadays?
Does Facebook themselves even want to use Hack?
Wouldn't Facebook rather want to use something else like Go, Kotlin, C# or Python?
It seems nobody outside Facebook is really using Hack so why are they pursuing it?

[Britoid]

How widely used is HHVM outside of Facebook?

*watches as tumbleweeds roll across the land*

[FireBurn]

I imagine they might feel a bit burned by supporting PHP as people basically "stole" their optimizations for PHP7 and then no one cared about HHVM

Which is the definition of OpenSource

I imagine they might feel a bit burned by supporting PHP as people basically "stole" their optimizations for PHP7 and then no one cared about HHVM

[re:fi.64]

Is this EEE? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in the wild?

Not much of an extinguish, HHVM wasn't used too much outside of Facebook. It's more just that FB has likely already moved their own PHP over to Hack, so HHVM supporting PHP doesn't have much reason anymore.

[ElectricPrism]

Is this EEE? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in the wild?

[Wychmire]

How widely used is HHVM outside of Facebook?

The MediaWiki foundation uses it for all their wikis (e.g. mediawiki.org, wikipedia.org) as you can see at the Special:Version page, but I believe they plan on removing support in a future version.

[maarten]

How widely used is HHVM outside of Facebook?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Facebook Releases HHVM 4.0 With PHP No Longer Supported

HHVM, formerly known as the HipHop Virtual Machine and what was born at Facebook as a higher-performance PHP implementation only to shift focus to running their own PHP-derived Hack programming language, has reached version 4.0 as it officially no longer supports PHP...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HHVM-4.0-Released