Facebook get's Hip and Hop

Facebook Rocks the PHP World with HipHop - Application Development from eWeek

Facebook have introduced their HipHop technology which allows PHP code to run more efficiently. It's not a compiler but a language translator, PHP is translated to C++ which is compiled using the g++ compiler. There's a C++ runtime to go the with compiled code.

Some elements of PHP have been removed, but the core elements and various extensions are supported.

Facebook say that the code runs 50% more efficiently (which is massive reduction for a site like Facebook which delivers 400 billion pages every month).

HipHop is being released as open source and was made available on GitHub servers yesterday for all to get access too.

PHP is still used on many sites and it will take a while for HipHop to be adopted, though high volume sites will probably looking at using it in the very near term if it will save CPU's, though it wont be for all as PHP is very easy to understand and make modifications to (as it's interpreted any modifications will be actioned next time the page is viewed). Now much more formal procedures will be required as in change the PHP source, translate to C++, compile and send to the the server. Larger sites will have some kind of source/update control in place anyway so they'll just need to incorporate the extra steps into their processes.