Every now and then there’s still some people who can’t believe PHP can be used for a big, successful project, when actually there are several examples of huge sites using PHP.
Here’s how some of them share their experience.
With over 1.49 billion active users, Facebook has been forced into finding creative, out-of-the-box solutions to scaling.
First, they introduced HipHop for PHP on 2010, a transpiler that took PHP code and converted it into a C++ binary.
Even though the project was largely successful, it forced an elaborate deployment process and several incompatibilities with some PHP language features.
On December 2011, they released the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), an open source virtual machine based on Just-In-Time compilation that allowed the greatly improved performance with an easier development and deployment process.
HHVM helped boost the PHP language development introducing lots of new features and a massive performance improvement on PHP7.