Hack: a new programming language for HHVM • Hacker News Board

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#11

Post by ecaron » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:26 PM UTC

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

Do you imagine a future where Hack will merge back into PHP (like PHP 7), in the same style that Beryl & Compiz then rejoined? Or does the team intend for the two to always be adjacent-yet-separate?

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#12

Post by jdp » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:26 PM UTC

Why a brand new language, instead of building or optimizing the PHP backend for HHVM with an existing language like Haxe? http://haxe.org/

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#13

Post by bos » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

rarestblog wrote: post #9

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

What IDE do people use for Hack?

Stay tuned. You'll hear more in due course.

In the mean time, the open source release of Hack includes integration with both Emacs and Vim.

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#14

Post by ecaron » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

habosa wrote: post #4

Facebook is always pushing PHP to new places. Would it be too broad to say PHP is the worst thing that ever happened to Facebook's engineering but Facebook's engineering is the best thing that ever happened to PHP?

I'd rephrase the question to be "Would Facebook be Facebook without PHP?"

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#15

Post by octo_t » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

whats the state of the type system like? Here[1] it suggests that it may have bugs, is this a 'covering backside' thing or is it currently unsound?

[1] - http://hacklang.org/manual/en/hack.annotations.summary.php

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#16

Post by caiob » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

Is this just syntax sugar or there are performance improvements upon php?

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#17

Post by wiremine » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:28 PM UTC

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

Thanks for taking the questions!

How extensively is Facebook using Hack at this point? Is it in production?

What has been the biggest learning/unlearning you've needed to do going from PHP to Hack?

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#18

Post by vanilla » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:28 PM UTC

Naming a language hack ... very poor choice. Searching for Go, C, C++ is already bad, now you can add hack to the list.

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#19

Post by bos » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:29 PM UTC

caiob wrote: post #16

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

Is this just syntax sugar or there are performance improvements upon php?

We are just beginning to use the static type information that Hack provides to yield performance optimizations, and that's definitely on the cards as something we'd like to push further.

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#20

Post by VeejayRampay » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:30 PM UTC

bos wrote: post #3

I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.

Could the same techniques you applied to PHP be applied to other dynamic languages like Ruby or Python?