Facebook re-write takes PHP to an enterprise past
Facebook's re-written PHP to transform the dynamic language for fast performance on web-scale server farms without adding additional hardware.
The site's engineers have announced HipHop, which turns the popular and dynamic PHP code into highly optimized but static C++ and then compiles it using the GNU C++ compiler, g++. The change has been released to the community under the PHP license, and you can read more here.
It's quite a change for a social network site that's a posterchild for the Web 2.0 revolution and online services, built on the new generation of scripting languages such as PHP and Agile development methodology of hacking code for short project cycles.
