HippyVM Sounds Interesting, But Only If It Would Work Right

HippyVM is an open-source project that's striving for 100% compatibility with Zend PHP while being more than seven times faster than stock PHP and more than twice as fast as Facebook's HHVM.

Following this weekend's PHP 7.0 benchmarking article, HippyVM was pointed out in the forums as a PHP interpreter that's supposedly faster than PHP and even the highly-optimized Facebook HHVM.

HippyVM comes down to being a PHP implementation using PyPy with RPython. This implementation for now is limited to Linux x86_64 support while eventually they plan to support other hardware architectures and operating systems.

Being curious about HippyVM, I followed the steps on their GitHub with building PyPy/RPython and then building hippyvm from Git. For the command-line drive Phoronix Test Suite, it began running but quickly crashed.

One of the earliest steps to the Phoronix Test Suite client process is checking an array of PHP modules that are required/recommended to see if they exist or not, and if they don't to print them out to the screen... During this very simple process that runs fine going back to at least PHP 5.2 as well as HHVM and even the older HipHop Compiler, HippyVM bailed out and didn't even print the output correctly but were blank lines. Thus that's as far as I got and wasn't able to benchmark HippyVM.

I'll certainly give HippyVM a shot at a later date when the issue(s) are hopefully resolved with it. Those wanting to learn more about this project can visit HippyVM.com.