Keith Adams, Engineer, HipHop Team, Facebook

Keith Adams is an engineer in Facebook's HipHop team. He's helped found the HipHop Virtual Machine, Facebook's next-generation just-in-time compiler infrastructure for PHP. He's also worked on Facebook's search engine. From 2000 to 2009, he worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor. His interests include virtualization, programming languages, computer architecture, kernels, and all apects of the hardware/softare interface.

Presentation: "PHP on the Metal with HHVM. MOVED TO BALLROOM BC"

Track: Mechanical Sympathy

Time: Friday 14:40 - 15:30

Location: Grand Ballroom BC

Abstract:

The PHP programming language resists efficient execution. Like many other popular web languages, PHP offers programmers the conveniences of dynamic typing, and late binding for functions and classes. PHP also introduces a few distinctive challenges: its reference argument-passing semantics, and its exposure of reference-counting as the underlying implementation for storage management. Facebook's HipHop VM (HHVM) is a new execution engine for PHP that combines ahead-of-time and just-in-time techniques to try save precious CPU cycles in the face of these challenges. Throughout the process of bringing HHVM to life, we've been surprised by counter-intuitive interactions with underlying hardware resources. We'll dive deep on a few of these surprises, and try to distill lessons for other dynamic language runtimes.