Facebook launches programming language for developers
A few days back, Facebook has launched a programming language “Hack”. It has been released to speed up the development process. A team of engineers was working over the project for the last couple of years, now proudly announces the tool for modern day Facebook app development.
As the new programming language claims, developing, testing and debugging apps for the Facebook will be easier and faster. Hack has been designed for Hip-Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM). The open source virtual machine executes Hack and PHP code. The just-in-time (JIT) approach used by helps it to achieve better performance while keeping the development flexibility of PHP. The HHVM is quickly becoming a favorite platform for PHP developers. The reason is that HHVM can run (even after its minor incompatibilities) top 20 GitHub PHP frameworks. The engineering team that developed HHVM has reiterated its objective to be able to run all PHP code existing out in the wild.
While CSS is about to replace JavaScript, Facebook’s combo of HHVM and Hack has promised to speed up the application development. Developers have faced huge problems while testing and debugging web apps. The reason is simple, they always have to follow a set of steps. Editing code, uploading, testing and debugging and repeating it again and again until it fits. Before Hack, it was never easy to test and debug web apps, and now this can be streamlined with Hack.
As Hack has been launched as an open source project, it is up to the PHP community to make it living up to the expectations. The thing we expect to see is an easy migration and support on other PH virtual machines and parsers. Another aspect of the expectations is built around competing engines and the possibility of competition driving performance improvements. In order to share the code and migration between cloud services and providers, support for Hack on multiple run-time will be crucial.
Hack is released, let’s hope it stays.