Does HippyVM actually work or do anything? Their website is so barren.
I wonder if it really offers any advantages these days. HHVM is really fast, PHP 7 is really fast, and PHP now has Zend (ew) OPcache and its optimiser built-in.
HippyVM is quite weird, too: it's made by Python developers who don't seem to have ever contacted anyone from PHP.
From the article: the difficulties in funding generally caused the HippyVM project to come to a stall.
Even the mother-project PyPy is struggling with finances. It's this weird thing that most of the Python world thinks is great, but doesn't quite understand...
There are quite a lot of other language implementations in RPython, since it is relatively easy to get off the ground. Use a comparatively high-level language to write the byte-code-interpreting loop and you get a JIT more or less for free (Seriously, if that kind of thing is interesting to anyone reading this, try it)
I agree with you and would like to add (to the author of Hippy): Why not contribute to HHVM (or fork it and improve it)? If you made a few tactical improvements to HHVM that sped it up a bit, and kept a few good ideas in your back pocket, I'm sure the whomever is PMing the project at Facebook would love to talk to you.
Don't want to work at Facebook? I understand that, but before you say no, infrastructure teams at large companies tend to have a lot of freedom and lack of politicos sniffing about. It might actually be quite a bit of fun on the HHVM team.
hippyvm as it is is indeed quite useless. it's faster than php7 on par with hhvm but it needs funding to get somewhere where you can actuaply run wordpress on it
I wonder if it really offers any advantages these days. HHVM is really fast, PHP 7 is really fast, and PHP now has Zend (ew) OPcache and its optimiser built-in.
HippyVM is quite weird, too: it's made by Python developers who don't seem to have ever contacted anyone from PHP.