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Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

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Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#21

Post by geerlingguy »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #17
teqsun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be terse, but did anyone outside of FB ever care about Hack? Mentally I always just knew "FB built everything in PHP, it got too gunky, they invented Hack to try to solve the issue without needing to rewrite everything" PHP usually ranks pretty high on many "developer hate" polls, so it's not too shocking to me that Hack never got the hype of React or Golang.

I worked on Hack during my Meta bootcamp and was surprised to learn that many people used and relied on Hack outside of Meta. It didn’t appear to be anywhere near the size and scope of PyTorch and React but the number of users looked relatively large!

Alternate anecdata, I've never seen someone use it outside of Facebook/Meta. I'm sure some people did but PHP 7 solved the performance issues people had with PHP 5, and PHP 8 nuked some of the footguns people complained about all the time, to the point, the few shops who looked at Hack / HHVM (and weren't switching to another language entirely) just stayed on PHP.

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#22

Post by evanelias »

jasongill wrote: post #9

This really does not come as a surprise. PHP 7 erased the performance gains that Hack had, and PHP 8 brought a lot of the last few missing pieces that helped modernize PHP. Hack was heavily optimized for Facebook-sized setups and was never intended to run in the places that PHP is most often run from (such as cPanel servers), so it never really picked up much traction among the PHP world. Non-PHP developers never eve…

Does PHP have async/await yet? In my mind that was always a huge advantage of HHVM/Hack which normal PHP completely lacked.

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#23

Post by evanelias »

geerlingguy wrote: post #21
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on Hack during my Meta bootcamp and was surprised to learn that many people used and relied on Hack outside of Meta. It didn’t appear to be anywhere near the size and scope of PyTorch and React but the number of users looked relatively large!

Alternate anecdata, I've never seen someone use it outside of Facebook/Meta. I'm sure some people did but PHP 7 solved the performance issues people had with PHP 5, and PHP 8 nuked some of the footguns people complained about all the time, to the point, the few shops who looked at Hack / HHVM (and weren't switching to another language entirely) just stayed on PHP.

Not sure of the status today, but Slack is/was one of the most high-profile non-Facebook users of Hack, e.g. https://slack.engineering/hacklang-at-slack-a-better-php/

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#24

Post by conor- »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #19

I'm a little surprised HHVM is still around, last time I checked it was barely (if at all) faster than vanilla PHP and PHP now has a lot of the comparible features like progressive type safety and concurrency (to an extent). There are even competing PHP compilers/interpreters/runtimes now like there has been for a while with other languages. I'm guessing there is some benefit to running HHVM on the type of large scal…

Wouldn't the large amount of existing services written in Hack be reason enough to keep it around?

The cost of rewrites at that scale certainly has to be far more expensive than the cost of paying a team to maintain HHVM

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#25

Post by znpy »

evanelias wrote: post #23
geerlingguy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternate anecdata, I've never seen someone use it outside of Facebook/Meta. I'm sure some people did but PHP 7 solved the performance issues people had with PHP 5, and PHP 8 nuked some of the footguns people complained about all the time, to the point, the few shops who looked at Hack / HHVM (and weren't switching to another language entirely) just stayed on PHP.

Not sure of the status today, but Slack is/was one of the most high-profile non-Facebook users of Hack, e.g. https://slack.engineering/hacklang-at-slack-a-better-php/

The post is from four years ago however, does anybody have an update on that topic?

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#26

Post by evanelias »

znpy wrote: post #25
evanelias wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure of the status today, but Slack is/was one of the most high-profile non-Facebook users of Hack, e.g. https://slack.engineering/hacklang-at-slack-a-better-php/

The post is from four years ago however, does anybody have an update on that topic?

Slack has a few eng blog posts from last year which seem to indicate they still use Hack, among other languages.

https://slack.engineering/hakana-taking-hack-seriously/ describes their open source enhanced Hack type checker, which is still actively maintained (most recent commit yesterday).

And https://slack.engineering/slacks-migration-to-a-cellular-arc... mentions they use a mix of languages: "services in the user-facing request path are written in Hack, Go, Java, and C++"

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#27

Post by psanford »

znpy wrote: post #25
evanelias wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure of the status today, but Slack is/was one of the most high-profile non-Facebook users of Hack, e.g. https://slack.engineering/hacklang-at-slack-a-better-php/

The post is from four years ago however, does anybody have an update on that topic?

As of the beginning of this year, slack still used a lot of hhvm.

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#28

Post by zpao »

Hi, Paul from the Open Source Team here at Meta. HHVM is still in use and there are no changes to the level of maintenance the open source project gets. There's no conspiracy, no quiet quitting. The reality is that we just had some issues that affected our automatic syncing a little while back and HHVM got stuck. Since use outside of Meta is relatively low, unsticking it was just lower priority.

But we see that you've noticed and I think the folks working on HHVM internally will get that corrected soon!

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#29

Post by jasongill »

evanelias wrote: post #22
jasongill wrote: post #9

This really does not come as a surprise. PHP 7 erased the performance gains that Hack had, and PHP 8 brought a lot of the last few missing pieces that helped modernize PHP. Hack was heavily optimized for Facebook-sized setups and was never intended to run in the places that PHP is most often run from (such as cPanel servers), so it never really picked up much traction among the PHP world. Non-PHP developers never eve…

Does PHP have async/await yet? In my mind that was always a huge advantage of HHVM/Hack which normal PHP completely lacked.

Thankfully, no - IMHO, PHP doesn't need non-blocking or asynchronous execution, as that's what makes it so accessible and understandable

Re: Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained

#30

Post by evanelias »

jasongill wrote: post #29
evanelias wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does PHP have async/await yet? In my mind that was always a huge advantage of HHVM/Hack which normal PHP completely lacked.

Thankfully, no - IMHO, PHP doesn't need non-blocking or asynchronous execution, as that's what makes it so accessible and understandable

Huh, I'm surprised by that take. await is one of the easiest-to-comprehend and readable approaches to concurrency. Slack summarized this better than I can, see the async/await section of their post https://slack.engineering/hacklang-at-slack-a-better-php/

Without async/await, PHP will remain a bad fit for large-scale applications that need to query data from numerous distinct services or data stores for a single page load without incurring major latency. It was an absolutely essential feature of Hack at Facebook. Lack of async/await in PHP was a huge problem at Tumblr when trying to reduce latency.

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