HHVM Beats Stable Version of PHP 7.0 In Recent Benchmark (kinsta.com)
campuscodi writes: PHP7 and HHVM have been exchanging punches for a while via benchmarks. While the PHP supporters were always saying, just wait until the stable version comes out, well... the stable version is out, and a recent benchmark reveals that "HHVM beats PHP7.0 hands down." Compared on: WordPress, Magento, Drupal8, Laravel, PyroCMS, and October CMS. You can still be a "PHP supporter" and favor HHVM, which "serves as an execution engine for the PHP and Hack programming languages."
Probably because changing which compiler version you use, etc. and changing it requires s few hours to a couple days at most, while re-writing an entire application in different language will take much, much longer.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I don't care about these results, for the simple fact that nothing guarantees that Facebook won't make any changes to HHVM in the future that is beneficial for Facebook, but adverse for all other PHP based webapplications. PHP 5 is fast enough for me. PHP 7 being significantly faster is more than good enough.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
In our company we have developed HTTP/REST based microservice architecture framework written in PHP, and our performance tests show that PHP 7 is much faster than HHVM:
PHP 5.6.13 - performance about 400 requests/second
HHVM 3.10 - performance about 600 requests/second
PHP 7.0.0 - performance about 750 requests/second
In addition with PHP 7 we avoid many compatibility issues with 3rd party extensions not or badly supported on HHVM. Consequently HHVM is going to be obsolete after PHP 7 stabilises a bit.
(I have also deployed PHP 7 on some Magento eshops and the performance gain is terrific compared to PHP 5.6.)