HipHop Virtual Machine by Facebook to speed-up PHP

Most popular Social networking Site Facebook  has moved one step ahead at making the PHP programming language runs more quickly. Facebook has developed a PHP virtual machine, called HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) that can executes the PHP web programming language as much as 9 times as quickly as running PHP on large systems.

Generally, programs written in interpreted programming language such as PHP do not run or execute as quickly as other languages such as C or C++ , that have been compiled beforehand into machine language byte code. It is a known fact that PHP is the most widely used web programming language understood by most of the web programmers who works in IT field. So to fasten up PHP, Facebook has originally devised a compiler called HipHop, that would translate PHP source code into C++ which will fastens PHP and ultimately give you better and quicker performance.

“Our goal is to make PHP run really, really quickly,” said Joel Pobar, a Facebook engineering manager. Facebook has been using the virtual machine, called the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), across all of its servers since earlier this year. Pobar discussed about this Virtual Machine at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) being held this week in Portland, Oregon.

HHVM works on the same principle as JVM (Java Virtual Machine). HHVM has a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that can convert the human readable source code into machine-readable byte code when it is needed.  Facebook has posted the HHVM code on GitHub that will allows programmers to speed up their PHP websites as well.