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On the other hand, Facebook being built on PHP meant they eventually felt the need to dedicate significant engineering time into building their own PHP VM (HHVM) along with their own spin-off of the PHP language (Hack) to get it to work for them.

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Yeah, and they could have switched to any language they wanted, but they stuck with PHP and created HHVM (they most likely run other languages as well).

They also felt the need to create other open source things you have had heard of, such as react.

Heh - it's funny you mention React there, in the context of sticking with PHP instead of jumping ship to some more appropriate technology:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest...

It was only 4 years ago when creating HTML5 based hybrid mobile apps was "the biggest mistake Facebook ever made", and it was all about "native apps" for iOS and Android... Now React and React Native are "the new hotness"...

Or maybe the devices are "good enough" now to actually run these sorts of things?

But yes, it is a circle of life.

Upstream PHP has gained to about the same speed, and added many of the features (e.g. gradual strict typing and generators). I don't think Facebook would have made the same decision today.

We also have some nice graphs about the speed of PHP 7: https://owncloud.org/blog/php-7-is-here-and-owncloud-is-read...

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