Facebook deploys one of the biggest PHP codebases in the world. They’re not only pushing the boundaries of what you can do with PHP, but also PHP itself. A few years ago they open-sourced their hiphop compiler and nowadays facebook.com runs on their latest generation of the HipHop Virtual Machine (hhvm).
What Facebook says about HipHop:
HipHop is Facebook's complete toolchain for the PHP language: interpreter, JIT compiler and debugger.
Facebook.com was motivated to create HipHop to save recources on their servers. They claim to be 40% faster than their previous version that was in fact a PHP to C++ compiler which was already faster than plain PHP 1.
source: Wow HHVM is fast…too bad it doesn’t run my code
In this blog series we’ll get you started with hhvm. We’ll get the symfony standard edition running and show the ins and outs of debugging your code with hhvm (which is awesome!). Today, we’ll start of by setting up hhvm in your own vagrant box.