By now everyone in the PHP community - and most technical leads at companies who rely on PHP - should have heard about Facebook's revolutionary new open source tool, HipHop. HipHop, like PHP itself, stands the chance of being a serious game changing technology. Their stated goal was to allow their developers to continue to enjoy the speed of development that PHP gives them while improving the overall performance of their application by transforming it into C++. The resulting "transformed and compiled" application can be up to 50% faster than the native PHP application.

There have been attempts in the past to create a PHP compiler to try and improve its speed. There are two points that set HipHop apart from the pack though.