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Comment by muglug | Hacker News Reader

> Server-side, we’ve been migrating from PHP to Hack since 2016

A 3+ year migration of the bulk of your codebase is sort of intense. Though the Hack team at Facebook has made some great tools to ease migration, their fairly aggressive sunsetting of PHP features in Hack has presumably made this job a little harder.

Also notable: Slack is the only equivalent company (outside of Facebook) that uses Hack, at least that I know of. I wonder if that makes Slack a more likely acquisition target.

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It is worthwhile to note that Slack's very recently departed chief architect had previously helped start the HHVM project.

I predict the next Chief Architect will stall (or begin a rollback of) HHVM at Slack. Too much time wasted migrating onto a nigh-proprietary platform for a now ambiguous value proposition.

PHP has integrated a lot of HHVM typing features in PHP 7.x and 8 I believe, so that lessens the need

He also once wrote an article citing concurrency as a benefit of PHP and advocated services making web requests to themselves as a good way of achieving that. How that was taken seriously, I will never know.

> I wonder if that makes Slack a more likely acquisition target.

M&A guy here. Sure, this is nice, but the answer is pretty much no.

Bad choices always bite you at some point.

To be fair the bad choices are what allowed them to ship quickly, get to product-market fit, and get to the point where the bad choices started to hurt them.

Most startups never see the effects of their bad (or good) choices because they go out of business.

Hard to say. Their bad choices definitely didn’t stop them from shipping quickly but it didn’t necessarily help.

Slack, Facebook? Bad choice? I think they're counting more cash than a rust nerd.

> Bad choices always bite you at some point.

Good choices too, for that matter. They tend to live until they turn into bad ones.

Quizlet also uses Hack.

Not really a comparable company. Quizlet has <100 employees and $32M funding. Slack has <5000 employees and has a $15B market cap on the public market.

I'm sure there are a ton of small-ish VC-funded startups using all sorts of technologies like Hack. As far as big companies though, FB and Slack are pretty much it.

True. My understanding is that they're fairly active in the Hacklang community; they're big enough to have received a mention in the HHVM docs: https://docs.hhvm.com/hhvm/FAQ/faq

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