Facebook releases HipHop to PHP as open source
Facebook announced that they are going to release their PHP to C++ source code transformer, called HipHop as open source. The article describes some amazing things like “With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page.”
Something strange about the part where they describe the reason behind the development of HipHop, though. They say that in order to enhance performance the common solution is to write parts of your back end in C++ or Java. The reason they chose a different route is because it “…drastically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work on your entire application…Given that our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer — we can’t afford to make parts of our codebase less accessible than others.” Maybe it’s just me but this sounds like Facebook has too few engineers and most of them are not capable of picking up C++.
