SYSTEM Cited by 1 source

HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

Definition

HHVM (hhvm.com) is Meta's open-source virtual machine originally built to run PHP, now primarily used to execute Hack — Meta's statically-typed PHP dialect. HHVM is the runtime underneath Meta's function-based systems: the web frontend, middle-tier services, and a large share of the backend. It uses JIT compilation to achieve native-code performance for what would otherwise be interpreted PHP/Hack.

Role on this wiki

Named in the 2024-08-31 Privacy Aware Infrastructure post as Meta's canonical function-based system — the runtime where Policy Zones is integrated to enforce purpose limitation at the call-tree / request-zone granularity. The PAI post explicitly cites HHVM alongside Presto and Spark as the three named integration targets:

"Policy Zones has been built into different Meta systems, including: Function-based systems that load, process, and propagate data through stacks of function calls in different programming languages. Examples include web frontend, middle-tier, and backend services. [link → hhvm.com]"

One of the three host languages for PAI runtime libraries is Hack, which runs on HHVM — the integration is both a runtime-level and a language-level investment.

Seen in

• sources/2024-08-31-meta-enforces-purpose-limitation-via-privacy-aware-infrastructure — named as Policy Zones' function-based-system integration point; Hack (the HHVM-hosted language) named as a PAI runtime-library target.

Related

• systems/meta-policy-zones — primary integration.
• systems/meta-privacy-aware-infrastructure — umbrella initiative.
• companies/meta