We already had this, it was called Hack. It mostly died an ignominious death because it was created by Facebook and people were worried Facebook would steal their IP if they used it. It was still awesome, though.
Props to HHVM, though, it really did seem to act like the swift kick up the arse for PHP that it needed, demonstrating just how unnecessarily slow PHP was and spurring them to deal with that.
Granted, there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead - mostly dead is slightly alive.
But until I see some Hack projects posted on Show HN, it's still dead enough to me. If there's no community development around it to speak of, there's no point in adopting it. I can't even get the repos I used to pull from to work anymore, Openshift never had proper support, no one seems eager to add support for hosting it, and no one is writing articles or updating docs for it as far as I can tell.
It hasn't reached the "rifle through Hack's pockets for loose change" state, but the prognosis doesn't seem good.