Facebook Announces The Hack Transpiler

Facebook today announced the Hack Transpiler as a tool to encourage the growth of their Hack programming language by allowing Hack code-bases to be converted back into legitimate PHP5 for use on platforms where Facebook's HHVM isn't available.

The Hack Transpiler via the h2tp command makes it possible to maintain a program's source tree in the PHP-based Hack language while allowing it to be converted back out into PHP when doing releases for platforms where the HipHop Virtual Machine isn't supported or available. While HHVM can run unmodified PHP code, the PHP5 engine is not backwards compatible with Hack code, which is why this tool is needed.

Those wishing to learn more about Facebook's Hack Transpiler / h2tp for converting Hack code back into PHP, see the Facebook code announcement. The h2tp utility is now part of the HHVM nightly code-base.