Facebook's HipHop - What's it for?

Question

The news in the PHP world today is Facebook\'s HipHop, which:

HipHop for PHP isn\'t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer.

Answer 1

Web applications that do a lot of processing and/or use a lot of memory. Apparently this HipHop will reduce CPU usage by around 50% and also reduce memory usage (I didn't see how much the memory usage would be reduced by mentioned anywhere). This means that you should be able to serve the same number of requests with fewer servers.

An added benefit may be that there will be some basic type checking to ensure that the code is consistent before it is compiled. This should help to locate the type of bugs that PHP currently tends to ignore as a result of its weak type system.

The downside appears to be that it might not support some of PHP's more dynamic features such as eval (though arguably that's a positive too).