Keith Adams guest lecture

On Nov 15, Keith Adams will give a guest lecture about HHVM, a compiler and VM developed and used at Facebook.

Keith is a Brown CS alum. He is the Founding Senior VP of Business at Pebblebed, formerly chief architect at Slack and engineer at Facebook, among many other positions.

Title: Delivering HHVM

Zoom link: https://brown.zoom.us/j/97457878919

Abstract: We commenced building the Hiphop Virtual Machine (HHVM) in 2010, as a cleanroom runtime for the PHP language. We were motived by Facebook's technical and business challenges in using PHP for the core of its multi-million LOC application codebase. HHVM prioritizes performance, developer experience, and an ongoing modernization of the core language.

HHVM accomplished its goals, saving Facebook billions of dollars in CPU costs and incalculable developer hours fighting bugs. It remains in heavy industrial use today, executing the gradually-typed language Hack, which Meta, Slack, and some startups use as their workhorse for application logic. In this talk, we'll delve deep into some of the technical problems and solutions we encountered, while also exploring some of the cultural and managerial causes and consequences of its adoption.