VK.com's PHP accelerator – kPHP source code (opens in new tab)

So basically it doesn't support 95% of all PHP code written in the past decade?

https://maps.google.com/?ll=59.935336,30.325956&spn=0.002389...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singer_House

Interestingly, it was built by Singer Corporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singer_Corporation

and essentially became the first business center in Russia [sic!] as lower floors were for Singer show rooms and the higher floors were rented out for other companies. Nowadays lower floors are housing the central book store («Дом Книги»). At the time it was built, its architecture was considered outlandish, but now it's one of the staples of St.-Petersburg.

HPHPc produced the C++ code and that was compiled into a single binary executable. The deployment process involved using bittorrent to distribute the blob to all of the production servers.

HPHPc wasn't abandoned per say, it was only deprecated once the performance improvements brought on by HHVM were significant enough to justify the transition.

I'm finding it difficult to find any more details because the documentation is in Russian.

I'm interested in the fact that both Facebook and the Russian equivalent independently started work on the same basic idea. It's almost like convergent evolution.

As HHVM is more performant than HPHPc, it's a more relevant comparison. Even then, it's not entirely apples-apples since HHVM supports (almost) the entire language, whereas kPHP seems to only support a subset. Doing so likely lets them make a lot of performance optimizations you couldn't make otherwise.