CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Facebook's "hack" ( https://code.facebook.com/posts/264544830379293/hack-a-new-programming-language-for-hhvm/ , http://hacklang.org/ ) is a revision to the PHP language -- it is (approximately) PHP5 with some additional syntax and features. Generally, it aims to provide more type-safety and more built-in sanity-checks.

Personally, I love the idea of hack -- explicit-typing makes it easier to read the code, and (for new developers) the sanity-checks provide better feedback about basic programming errors. That seems quite useful on a large codebase with an open developer community. I'd be all gung-ho for hack in Civi, except that...

To date, the hack language was only available on Facebook's HHVM. Facebook's HHVM sounds awesome (faster and better designed than the traditional Zend PHP), but it doesn't have the same deep market-penetration as Zend PHP (e.g. umpteen linux distros + MAMP + XAMPP + web-hosts). Given Civi's distribution model, that's a huge obstacle.

This week, Facebook made an announcement which may change things:

https://code.facebook.com/posts/398235553660954/announcing-the-hack-transpiler/

If this project pans out, one could write Civi's code in Hack -- but publish *.php versions for use on any PHP 5.4+ system. This might work like the CoffeeScript=>Javascript or SCSS=>CSS transpilers[F1] which became popular for frontend development.

The transpiler is still pretty new, so I'm not proposing any changes today -- just wondering about the sense of the room on the concept.

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[F1] I hate the word "transpiler," but so many people are using it, and it only takes three syllables, so I guess I better use it, too.

It seems like a cool idea. My only concern is about having to debug things in two places. I.e. I found this issue, but the Hack looks fine, maybe it's the PHP".

I'm sure that instances of that would be rare, but they could be really hard to debug thanks to the extra layer.

J