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Comment by orangethirty | Hacker News Reader

Does facebook still use PHP?

Yes, but no. Since moving to HipHip which is a translated/compiled version of PHP, we have been able to fork the language to clean it up. We have a strongly typed version, Generators, etc.

Syntactically it looks a lot like PHP and is backward compatible for many thing, but it's not really PHP anymore. The HipHop team has done a ton to make the language a lot more enjoyable to work in.

I did not know you went to such extent. At that scale that makes sense. Do you plan to open source it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwek7dZDFN0 is a pretty good talk about everything coming down the pipe. Generics, Strict typing, Collections, etc.

Too my knowledge (I'm not directly on the Hip-Hop team) it will be open sourced, additionally we also generally present a PHP patch as well to allow it in future versions of standard PHP.

They do (according to a post I saw on here a couple of months ago). But for people who don't know, they have an open source VM called HipHop (https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php) that consumes the PHP.

Yes, if the .php extensions on most of the URLs is any indication.

Hm, I clicked all around the site and wasn't able to get a .php in any of my URLs. They were all "clean" or "pretty" URLs, as I would expect from a profesional, large web app. I wonder why we have different URLs.

https://www.facebook.com/home.php

That's most likely just an endpoint named 'home.php' which now leads to some controller instead of actually loading a file called home.php

When I click "Home," I just get https://www.facebook.com/. I wonder why you get the php urls.

The redirect url for outgoing links has .php at the end.

Hm, I looked a lot of the links in my news feed and they were all direct.

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