Facebook has unveiled a new programming language, and it is called Hack. The new language, which was developed by a team of Facebook engineers, was designed to allow faster changes and minimal glitches when it comes down to updating the social network.
Facebook said, the Hack language came from PHP, which the team of engineers streamlined to make better. Furthermore, Hack the team managed to migrate nearly all of Facebook's PHP code to Hack over the last year, says Julien Verlaguet, a Facebook engineer via the company's blog.
"Today we're releasing Hack, a programming language we developed for HHVM that interoperates seamlessly with PHP. Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages."
"We have deployed Hack at Facebook and it has been a great success. Over the last year, we have migrated nearly our entire PHP codebase to Hack, thanks to both organic adoption and a number of homegrown refactoring tools."
The main reason behind the switch to Hack was because certain challenges with PHP made simple tasks too tricky. Furthermore, these problems with PHP caused coding errors to go undetected until the script has gone live on Facebook. Hack has improved these problems, which should make Facebook a better place for social network users.
Making Hack open source
The engineering team didn't stop short at converting all of Facebook's code base to Hack. Apparently, the plan was also to make the language open source for anyone to use, and that has been done.
"We're also proud to release an open source version of Hack to the public at https://hacklang.org/ as part of our HHVM runtime platform, which will now support both Hack and PHP," says Facebook.
Whether or not Hack will ever see, mass adoption outside of Facebook is left to be seen. Some programmers might not be interested in leaving the core PHP language behind, so at the end of the day, Facebook might turn out to be the only entity that stands firmly behind Hack for the rest of its lifespan.
