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.