Overview
This last week I was lucky enough to step onto Facebook’s campus for their first ever Hack Developer Day. Throughout the day developers and project managers gave talks about HHVM and Hack. From overviews to the nitty gritty details, each talk brought more insight into why this language was created. Below are a few of the talks that I thought were the best of the bunch.
Hack Language and Library Features
This talk walks through most of the new features of the Hack language. With just this overview of the language, most PHP developers could start using Hack in just a few minutes. Although HHVM has lots of documentation, this talk solidifies the features with relevant examples for the development community.
HHVM Performance Status
Edwin Smith did an amazing job of explaining how HHVM is changing the game. Every developer should understand at least this much about low level architecture. After this talk, I remembered why I started in computer science in the first place. It is all about the nitty gritty details.
Conclusion
Overall, Hack Developer Day 2014 was an eye opening experience and look into the future. No one knows for sure whether Hack will be more than just an internal Facebook programming language or if mainstream developers will adopt it. Either way, it’s quite clear that Facebook and their performance-driven approach will bring big changes to the programming community.
As a side note, I was able to ask about multi-threading in Hack and HHVM for future releases. I’m hopeful that in the next year or so the API that was mentioned will be available.