Speeding up PHP-based development with HipHop VM

What this post added

This post details the evolution of HipHop VM (HHVM) as a successor to HPHPc, focusing on its JIT compilation approach. It highlights HHVM achieving parity with HPHPc in performance for Facebook's codebase, reducing development environment load times by over 3x compared to HPHPi, and unifying production and development environments. Technical deep dives cover improvements to the JIT compiler, including adding JIT support for less common instructions (like member instructions for array/object access), implementing 'side exits' to handle rare conditions that could affect correctness, and using type prediction for method call return types to create longer, more efficient tracelets. The post also mentions ongoing open-source efforts and plans for broader PHP codebase compatibility.