Re:HipHop for PHP in Production at Hyves
by ojilles on Thursday December 22, 2011 @09:26AM
(#3381583)
Willem, how much of the performance improvement was related to Smarty templates being compiled to C++ vs. the application itself?
Re:HipHop for PHP in Production at Hyves
by willemst on Friday December 23, 2011 @03:28AM
(#3385107)
We did not measure this separately. With Hiphop, you compile a bunch of PHP files to a binary executable file. Once you have this file, you cannot load any new PHP files like you can with vanilla PHP. So including the Smarty templates is kind of mandatory.
Stuff like closures, eval(), create_function(), constants with dynamic names (e.g. defining constants from an array) and class destructors were all not supported. Some more subtle stuff: you cannot use current() to get the first element of an array in Hiphop, class_exists() always returns true.
We also had to port our custom PHP extensions.
Finally, we spend a lot of time on related stuff such as precompiling all Smarty templates (so that the generated PHP gets translated to C++ too), using Hiphop's daemon system and setting up compile, build and deploy systems.