iain proctor

Mostly working on Facebook's PHP implementation: compiler work and performance optimization. Some other compiler work after for a privacy specification language. Facebook is notorious for being built on PHP, though by now it has its own custom language, Hack, which has added some modern features. The root of that effort was HPHP, a project begun in 2007 and which I joined in 2008 as the second team member. This project had the goal of improving over Zend PHP's performance, addressing high hardware costs and site slowness. The approach was a static compilation into C++ targeting a new optimized runtime. This approach did well in that it delivered a huge performance improvement within 2 years and with a small team. Of course, now we all know the way to go with these things is a JIT interpreter. That approach was taken with a child project, HHVM, which I did not take part in. As much as I was grateful to get to do high impact programming language work right out of school, I felt I had already given enough of my youth to PHP.

My work has focused on building the platform and core abstractions that support trip flow.