React, Flux, GraphQL, Hack, HHVM...? All of this and more!
Drupal is a very popular CMS / Framework at the moment in the world. WIth a strong community it's bound to get support for HHVM, but what is the state of it now...
Facebook's HHVM efforts may have matured a lot in the four years it's been released. Nowadays installing and running HHVM via PHP-FPM is trivial and the team is making great effort to support popular PHP frameworks and Content Management Systems.
Looking back at Drupal 7 is a useless exercise for HHVM since neither Drupal 8 or HHVM are still ripe for mass production deployment. HHVM might be, but Drupal 8 is definitely not ready. The Facebook HHVM team is working on support for Drupal 8 (and the Symfony 2 components) for HHVM: http://hhvm.com/frameworks/
PHP became ubiqutious not because it is the best technically, but because it is the easiest to run without hassle. For HHVM to reach this state it needs to run similarly as the default PHP runtime. Not just the web hosting, but all CLI tools (such as Composer, Drush, etc. utilities).
While HHVM will still radically improve PHP execution, it can be argued on how much it will benefit normal (the 99.99999%) of websites. Probably not a lot, but it could significantly lower the CPU requirements of cloud hosting running thousands of Drupal installations.
Time will tell exactly how Drupal 8 with HHVM will pan out :)
Tweet