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hhvm
C++2010–2025
meta / hhvm

hhvm

A virtual machine for executing programs written in Hack.

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
65Distinct people
75Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
18.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A virtual machine for executing programs written in Hack.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year75 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2010-02-03 00:23:26 UTC to 2025-01-02 20:28:29 UTC.

0510152010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments20102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 1 submissions, 14 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 0 submissions, 15 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15114
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15015
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
HHVM HHVM page | HHVM documentation | Hacklang page | General group | Dev group | Twitter HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining amazing development flexibility. HHVM should be used together with a webserver like the built in, easy to deploy Proxygen, or a FastCGI-based webserver on top of nginx or Apache. Installing If you're new, try our getting started guide. You can install a prebuilt package or compile from source. Running You can run standalone programs just by passing them to hhvm: hhvm example.hack. If you want to host a website: Install your favorite webserver. Proxygen is built into HHVM, fast and easy to deploy. Install our package Start your webserver Run sudo /etc/init.d/hhvm start Visit your site at http://.../main.hack Our getting started guide provides a slightly more detailed introduction as well as links to more information. Contributing We'd love to have your help in making HHVM better. If you're interested, please read our guide to contributing. License HHVM is licensed under the PHP and Zend licenses except as otherwise noted. The Hack typechecker is licensed under the MIT License except as otherwise noted. The Hack Standard Library is licensed under the MIT License except as otherwise noted. Reporting Crashes See Reporting Crashes for helpful tips on how to report crashes in an actionable manner. Security For information on reporting security vulnerabilities in HHVM, see SECURITY.md. FAQ Our user FAQ has answers to many common questions about HHVM, from general questions to questions geared towards those that want to use. There is also a FAQ for contributors to HHVM.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

15 sources
vderas·Oct 2, 2014
I'm not sure if this was added to the article after your reply, but the author mentions Hack specifically, along with some caveats about it's adoption, namely that it is currently unkown how widespread Hack will be and how you're basically at Facebook's mercy in regards to the future of the language. As for adoption, the only stat that I could find was adoption for HHVM[1] (a virtual machine for executing Hack and PHP[2]), but since they list Wikipedia among the HHVM adopters, I'm pretty sure this does not equate to adoption of Hack itself. [1]:https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/wiki/Users [2]:http://hhvm.com/
In A possible future for PHP
masklinn·Sep 23, 2014
> The only way to avoid that is to take it out of that pipeline (i.e. pre-optimise the PHP OPCodes before a request arrives). Most production installations of PHP pretty much mandate a bytecode cache and the official distribution bundles one since 5.5[0], so the redundancy check is done once but the optimisation works for any request thereafter. > PHP pre-compilers and other optimisers absolutely exist and are readily used (e.g. HipHop). HHVM is a completely separate VM which does not use (or consume, or care for in any way) the Zend bytecode produced by the Zend VM. HHVM has its own separate and incompatible bytecode format called HHBC[1]. It's neither a "pre-compiler" nor an "optimiser" for the Zend VM. [0] http://php.net/manual/en/opcache.installation.php [1] https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/doc/byteco...
In PHP: why GOTO instead of recursion?
SaraMG·Mar 21, 2014
"Can HHVM use standard PHP extensions?" Our internal plumbing is different, so the extension APIs aren't the same, thus PHP extensions can't normally be used with HHVM. Paul has a source-compatability transformer which works for simple extensions (no fancy stuff allowed), but we recommend anyone with an extension consider porting the code. If your extension is one of those "This was written in PHP but we wanted it to be faster so we turned it into C" types, you should consider going back to PHP for it. In practice, we find that HHVM can JIT PHP code into running about as fast as (sometimes faster than) C/C++ extension code. If you do need to dip into C/C++ (because you're calling an external library), the API we've designed is a LOT easier to work with than PHP's. And I say that with the authority of having written THE book on writing
Read the rest
PHP extensions: http://amazon.com/dp/067232704X . I'm working on proper documentation for extensions as we speak, but for now you can find some very basic info at https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/wiki/Extension-API .
In Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
pigDisgusting·Feb 23, 2014
That's because it isn't. Or at least not in the traditional sense. It's not just some old bullshit, scripted in PHP, running on an array of scrappy LAMP boxen. They run their PHP on HHVM for one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP https://github.com/facebook/hhvm ...and yeah, it executes PHP code, for sure. But right there, things are already different, and the reality is that they've written a substantial code base in C/C++. And, two, I'm sure they retain some serious business proprietary trade secrets about their server infrastructure, meaning that while the web front-end might render out HTML like a souped-up CDN, behind the scenes, there is a shit ton of other stuff going down. Honestly, I think they just leave the file name extensions in the URL for the sake of nostalgia.
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