It was years back when Mark Zuckerburg started with the Social Networking beast,Facebook. The wiz kid dropped out from his college life and invested all his efforts into the single project. Creating such a site, definitely needs a strong programming language in the backend support.
It was PHP language that accompanied Mark in building his own empire , but after this huge success and user base the language has shown its flaws.Stepping back to the good old Java sounds good,but practical application usage is impossible for such a complex networking site. A new language named HACK , considered to be the successor of PHP language was introduced today, developed for HHVM( Hip Hop Virtual Machine ) that interoperates seamlessly with PHP.
Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming language.
This new language provides instantaneous type checking via a local server that watches the file system.It typically runs in less than 200 milliseconds,making it easy to integrate into your development workflow without introducing a noticeable delay.
The language is said to be the outcome of facebook engineers Bryan O’Sullivan, Julien Verlaguet and Alok Menghrajani’s tireless years of hard work. This time strategy played right and the programming language was announced open source which would be the boosting factor for the software in the developer industry. As a part of HHVM platform, both PHP and Hack is now supported.
The language would be a good competitor to the Apple’s new release swift,though they are for different platforms.
Some important features hack brings us would be,
- Instantaneous Type Checking – Unlike PHP the architecture is made in a way that type checker is made in local server that watches the file system.
- Code Migration – Hack was developed such that it can coexist directly with other PHP files as it is being introduced incrementally.
- PHP files unchanged – Hack was made sure it does not affect PHP source code, also HHVM is still a PHP runtime.
The ease that is promised by the language if properly delivered to the developers with no flaws,then this software would be ruling atleast for the next decade.