Facebook Continues Advancing HHVM For Its PHP Needs

Facebook continues pushing forward its HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) as a viable alternative to the upstream PHP interpreter and it continues running a heck of a lot faster.

At the beginning of February was the HHVM 2.4.0 release. HHVM 2.4 features a full rewrite of its INI parser, implements try { } finally {} support, turns on Region JIT for possible performance improvement, support for other missing PHP functionality or to match upstream php-src, and various other improvements.

More details on HHVM 2.4 can be found via HHVM.com. Last year was when Facebook started on greatly improving HHVM's features and performance to the point it's almost a drop-in replacement to PHP5 in terms of language support and functionality. I've seen some major performance benefits of HHVM over PHP but those are getting outdated so I will run some new HipHop Virtual Machine benchmarks in the near future.

HHVM is also doing bi-weekly releases of the project to deliver more changes and there are already more PHP changes for those interested.