This is a VERY interesting post from the Facebook Engineering team. Tonight, they’ll be releasing a project they call HipHop to the open source community. HipHop generates semantically compatible C++ from PHP code and compiles it to machine code using the g++ compiler. This results is significantly faster and more efficient code running on a web server.
Aside from this announcement, I know little about the project, but you can be sure it’s something I’ll be checking out as soon it’s released.