Jon Snyder/WIRED
Facebook’s social network got so big, it had to build the thing an entirely new foundation.
It’s a story that shows just how far the giants of the internet must go to ensure that their services can reliably juggle traffic from hundreds of millions of people across the globe. It wasn’t just that Facebook had to replace the foundation of its social network—now used by more than 1.35 billion people across the globe. The company had to create a new kind of foundation.
This creation is called HHVM. Basically, it’s a way of more efficiently running the PHP programming language, the language that helps drive all the stuff you do on Facebook each day. That may seem like a small and geeky thing tagged with one of those computer-y acronyms that looks a lot like all the others. But this protect was vitally important to the continued expansion of Facebook—before HHVM, PHP wasn’t well suited to running such a massive website—and as it turns out, the project is now helping drive the future of other big-name online services as well.
On Wednesday, the file-sharing startup Box revealed that it will move its increasingly popular online services onto HHVM, following in the footsteps of Wikipedia and the Chinese search giant Baidu. Facebook, you see, has open sourced HHVM, freely sharing it with the world at large, as it so often does with the software it creates to drive its online empire. In the end, the tool could help juice many other sites as well, in part because WordPress, the popular website hosting software, was built with PHP too.
HHVM can provide a notable speed improvement for existing PHP sites, says Joe Marrama, a senior software engineer at Box, and it’s better suited to building and running large services along the lines of Box. But, perhaps more importantly, the tool could help move these sites move to a new incarnation of PHP called Hack.
Also developed at Facebook, Hack is designed to run atop HHVM, and it can improve PHP sites in other ways. It’s part of a movement towards programming languages that let you not only quickly build software and quickly execute it, but also better organize software code and more readily weed out bugs and other coding errors. “There are all sorts of wonderful things Hack brings to the table,” says Facebook’s Paul Tarjan, “and it’s only available on HHVM.”
In the past, programming languages were often divided into two camps: those, like PHP, that provided speed of development, and those, like C++ and Java, that provided speed of execution while making it easier to weed out bugs. Now, many languages, including not only Hack but also Apple’s Swift and D, another language Facebook has tinkered with, are striving to find a sweet spot between the two.
Marrama says that Hack can make PHP “much more attractive” option for developing websites, and though Box has yet to move to the new language, the company plans to consider it in the future.
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