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Facebook's HipHop Also a PHP Webserver
darthcamaro writes "As expected, Facebook today announced a new runtime for PHP, called HipHop. What wasn't expected were a few key revelations disclosed today by Facebook developer David Recordan. As it turns out, Facebook has been running HipHop for months and it now powers 90 percent of their servers — it's not a skunkworks project; it's a Live production technology. It's also not just a runtime, it's also a new webserver. 'In general, Apache is a great Web server, but when we were looking at how we get the next half percent or percent of performance, we didn't need all the features that Apache offers," Recordon said. He added, however, that he hopes an open source project will one day emerge around making HipHop work with Apache Web servers.'"
An experienced C++ programmer rarely creates memory leaks, and they are easily detected by a variety of tools.
Also, for PHP-style programs it might be easier to just restart a child server process each N requests. So memory leaks are of even less concern.
The main problem is compilation speed. C++ compilers are just plain slow.