First steps with HHVM and Vagrant

Speaking of HHVM, would any PHP subject matter experts be interested in submitting pull requests to add HHVM tests to our project [1]? It would be worthwhile to see raw PHP and one or two mainstream PHP frameworks on HHVM versus the existing nginx/FPM configuration of the same.

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/

HHVM has a bytecode format, an intermediate language (though just via C++ AST's I believe), and a fairly clean FFI interface to C++. I would be really interested if FB opened up the details a tad more than the two txt files in docs and made it easier for non-PHP devs to play around with writing a frontend for a new/different language.

As promised if you want to skip the whole setup you can download the configured vagrant box by doing the following:

  - mkdir vagrant-hhvm

  - cd vagrant-hhvm

  - vagrant init

  - vagrant box add hhvmdev https://www.dropbox.com/s/5qyjkes49nk5abt/package.box

Last time I tried to use HH, there was no proper php5.4 support. no traits made HH a no-go. Compiled with the fact that namespacing didn't work right, it was just not viable.

That was a few months ago though, so maybe things are better now.

Those bold things in the first paragraph would be wonderful if they were links. As is, I was deeply frustrated by my inability to do anything other than highlight them.