Facebook Releases HHVM 3.23 With OpenSSL 1.1 Support, Experimental Bytecode Emitter

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Facebook Releases HHVM 3.23 With OpenSSL 1.1 Support, Experimental Bytecode Emitter

HHVM 3.23 has been released as their high performance virtual machine for powering their Hack programming language and current PHP support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HHVM-3.23-Released

[Michael_S]

Since Facebook has the potential to save millions or even billions of dollars in server and energy costs by making HHVM more efficient, this might become an impressively fast scripting language over time.

But my understanding is that right now they're well behind the performance of, say, the Java Runtime Environment or Node.js.

[coder]

Since Facebook has the potential to save millions or even billions of dollars in server and energy costs by making HHVM more efficient, this might become an impressively fast scripting language over time.

Do they really spend $billions on electricity?

Regardless, that's an interesting way to think of compiler optimizations. Perhaps GCC should have a new optimization target -Oe, which minimizes energy use, on the specified target CPU. It might differ from optimizing for speed, in terms of the relative costs of additional CPU cycles vs. the energy involved in misses at various levels of the cache hierarchy.

[starshipeleven]

Do they really spend $billions on electricity?

Maybe not, but it sure is relevant and noticeable.
Serious datacenters have also quite powerful air conditioning systems to pump all the waste heat outside of the server rooms, and these things usually have a bigger impact on the energy bill than the server themselves.