Came here to say this! I hacked phpBB to build a “Facebook before Facebook” for my friends in high school. Added features like a poetry authoring tool, turn based games, and a blog feature. While I don’t use php any more I absolutely would not be where I am today without phpBB!
From what I hear facebook is also mostly hack, which is a similar language to php. I believe it is even backwards compatible with php (or at least it used to be).
Facebook started with PHP - but quickly replaced the standard library, the interpreter, and then eventually the language itself (Hack still looks kind-of-like PHP, but is no longer compatible)
(Working with both vanilla PHP and Hack; I find the latter orders of magnitude nicer to work with - just for XHP alone, I wish I could switch my PHP projects to be Hack projects...)
Does anyone use Hack outside of Facebook. Disclaimer: it’s been years since I looked at it and even at the time it was a very cursory look as PHP 7 was buzzing.
Slightly of topic, but is Hack a thing outside of Facebook? I'm a little thrown off by the confusing standard library of PHP, but I don't know if using Hack instead would solve more problems than it creates.
I started web programming using PHP back in 2000, but quickly moved to Python a couple of years later and never looked back. That is, until I joined FB this year as a data engineer. Programming in PHP with Hack/XHP is awesome.
> Facebook was initially coded in pure, vanilla PHP, but over the years, [they] needed more capabilities [...] so, FB developed their own proprietary programming language based on PHP, which they dubbed Hack."
Facebook still uses PHP heavily. Technically it's a language called "Hack" (PHP augmented with some nice modern features), and runs either on HHVM (JIT: PHP/Hack -> C -> binary) or precompiled to binary.
The Facebook www code is written in Hack, which started off as a PHP-compatible language / stdlib, and then dropped PHP compatibility when it was holding them back.
Having worked with both, any one of the major additions (XHP, good type annotations, sane collection types, etc) makes my development experience 10x better; going back to vanilla PHP now just makes me sad...
Sad. Facebooks involvement by utilizing PHP and pushing the language by extending it was a good sign for the PHP community. Would have loved to see that they align with PHP7 or even further, push their engineers into improving PHP itself. PHP has such a huge ecosystem. I wouldn't risk to bet on Hacks future.
Not surprised at the list. Hack stands out as unique to facebook. Is hack being used in other large companies? I wonder if they will ever move back to php now that many issues facebook had have been resolved in later versions.
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