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Comment by elktea | Hacker News Reader

Interesting you're considering Hack. Does Hack fix all the weird warts PHP has carried into this century?

Some of Hack's features such as return type declarations and scalar type hints will be in PHP 7 due to be released later this year.

PHP 7 also includes some serious performance improvements, contextual parsing, anonymous classes, combined comparison operator, null coalese operator and tens of other new features.

Indeed.

Also, preliminary reports indicate that PHP7 is near parity in speed/memory usage with HHVM (and in some cases exceeding it).

Hack does not fix all the weird warts PHP has given us, there are far too many of those :)

It does give you some level of sanity (aka types). It also gives you tooling (autocompletion, ability to do basic code refactoring, etc.).

And yet, there's plenty of other, existing, proven languages out there that have had types and those tooling (beyond the 'basic') out there.

I'm not looking for a language battle here, but is inventing your own language based on your favorite language to bring common features from other language really such a good idea?

If you have an existing codebase in PHP, Hack provides a backwards compatible way to improve the state of things.

I have experienced both cases: a conversion of a large codebase from php to Hack and also a conversion from php to rails. Pick the right tool for the right job.

That sounds like a horrible idea in both cases ...

> I'm not looking for a language battle here, but is inventing your own language based on your favorite language to bring common features from other language really such a good idea?

It worked wonders for C++.

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