Facebook's HHVM Begins Seeing Rust Rewrite

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Facebook's HHVM Begins Seeing Rust Rewrite

Facebook's HHVM implementation that started off as a high performance PHP5 implementation but is now just focused on powering their own Hack programming language is beginning to see some of its code rewritten in Rust...

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

[timofonic]

Are there any performance benchmarks? What are their plans and goals for their Rust rewrite?

[Mateus Felipe]

What are their plans and goals for their Rust rewrite?

Probably, make the parser clearer and safer. I don't think it's going to see relevant performance improvement by doing this, by itself, but maybe it's going to make room for future optimizations.

[q2dg]

Maybe P++ could have been another interesting way to be investigated by HHVM folks...

[timofonic]

Maybe P++ could have been another interesting way to be investigated by HHVM folks...

What's that? Please elaborate...

[q2dg]

What's that? Please elaborate...

Well...for instance https://www.infoworld.com/article/34...r-dialect.html

[reavertm]

Which p++ do you mean? That name, according to Google, is already taken by two other programming languages.

[ssokolow]

and with this release they have been transitioning some of their code from OCaml to Rust.

How fitting, given that the Rust compiler made the same transition a decade ago.

[hikingpete]

It's somewhat surprising to see a transition from OCaml to Rust. OCaml is (generally) safe, and has a long history of high performance, so neither performance nor safety is the obvious motivator. My guess is either they're doing it to get rid of the language runtime/garbage collector, or to make the code-base more familiar to other developers. In either case Rust is a natural target since its type system is so heavily based on the MLs. My money (~$0.02) is on making the code-base more accessible.

[Guest]

This sounds pretty good. Rust looks like a good language in general from what I've messed around with, and I hope it takes off.

Consider this to be a big win for Mozilla, as their language is getting more attention.