Can I use Facebook's hiphop with frameworks like Zend Framework, cakephp, symfony

Question

Yesterday Facebook launched HipHop, a sourcecode-converter from php to c++. The set of php functions and constructions is more limited than in standard php.

Are the current popular php frameworks (ZF, CakePHP, symfony) compatible with HipHop? If not, which parts of these frameworks are not usable?

Answer 1

If I'm not mistaken, HipHop has not been released yet -- even the wiki page linked from the Facebook annoucement yesterday is not up yet.

So, it's going to be a bit hard to answer, right now.

I suppose it'll all depend on :

• The features used by the Frameworks -- like already said here and there, stuff like eval is not supported by HipHop
• The PHP extensions used by the Frameworks : only a couple of those have been ported by Facebook to HipHop.
• Depending on the Frameworks and your specific needs, maybe/probably some subsets of the Frameworks you are using will be supported, even if not every available components... I suppose time will tell which ;-)

Answer 2

With at least ZF and Symfony being used for Enterprise level applications, chances are pretty good they will run with HipHop. If not now, then sooner or later. However, the question is not so much if they can run with these frameworks, but how your supporting IT architecture looks like.

HipHop is for scaling large multiserver high traffic sites like Facebook. In your regular web application, you will likely get no advantage out of it. Just continue to use memcache and APC.

See these related articles:

• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rasmus-lerdorf-php-hiphop-facebook.php
• http://ilia.ws/archives/213-My-Thoughts-on-HipHop.html
• http://terrychay.com/article/hiphop-for-faster-php.shtml
• http://www.brandonsavage.net/hiphop-for-php-who-benefits-who-doesnt/