As far as I'm aware, HHVM isn't something that FB is charging for. If that's true, what's the business interest?

The same one I mentioned before: getting other people to use it benefits them, as other people will help maintain it because they also have a stakehold in its success. It's a huge project to maintain.

If you define it that way then there's almost nothing in the world that would categorize as altruism. Helping kids in Africa? It's only to make yourself feel good. Helping that fallen granny get up? It's to make yourself look good in front of others. Etc. If you go that far, both egoism and altruism will have completely lost their meanings.

>Helping kids in Africa? It's only to make yourself feel good. Helping that fallen granny get up? It's to make yourself look good in front of others.

Exactly! Of course we do things to make ourselves feel good. And since helping other people makes us feel good, why shouldn't we be honest about our motives? It's win-win.

Is it a huge project to maintain? I thought the first HipHop implementation was a 2-person side project. Relative to FB's size, does it matter even if they had to put 10 people on it?

Originally, yes, but it's grown since then, and bear in mind that it is critical infrastructure that Facebook are now completely dependant on.

The other business interest is... as it gets more adopted, more people will know the ins and outs, and the talent pool for them to pick from will grow.

More other businesses using it also makes it harder for people to make the argument against it as "it's just a Facebook thing"

Yes. It's probably hard to hire developers if they must program in an obscure internal-only dialect of PHP (Hack).

That comment got downvoted to -1! I'm not saying Hack is obscure and used only by Facebook - but it would have been had Facebook not open-sourced HHVM and tried to promote its use.

It's not that obscure. Anyone with an ounce of experience in PHP can start writing solid Hack on day one. And that would still be true even if Hack were never seen in the wild.

Unless you think it's hard changing the open tag from <?php to <?hh :p

I'd be surprised if anything-PHP is a bonus to hiring. Most likely people work on it despite of PHP, not because of it.

No, many people work on it because of PHP - because of the speed and flexibility of dev with it.

I've done PHP, some Ruby, some .NET, Java and more - coming back to PHP is often fun and a breath of fresh air. Nothing's perfect.

Um, this is literally the open source process. This is how it's supposed to work.

http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/