HHVM VS flow

Learned of this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37186869 it was posted 2 years ago to no discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30291459 seems far more interesting than that.

https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/hack/doc/H... appears to be where it was proposed, and has more background than the current docs.

also fredemmott is not working on it any more https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/issues/9376

Hack and Flow are also written in OCaml.

Here is a commit generated by clippy fix without Cargo involved: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/commit/efea2c4dcc12fdbf3a2e3ce383bbdca2de5f93a9

Compared to PHP, with its visible community, Hack/HHVM does seem like a dead-end technology. But it’s very actively maintained and it powers the largest website on the planet. It definitely doesn’t make sense for the average PHP developer to switch (and the article steers clear of evangelising) but it also definitely doesn’t make sense for us to switch back.

PHP is nearly as old as the web. Change the conversation and say: I use Hack on the Hip Hop Virtual Machine

It's not as popular as typescript but not dead, it's consistently active [0] for a decade.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/flow/graphs/contributors

One alternative that I found was flow, thought haven't used it. There is a bevy of languages that transpiles to JS, though some seemingly lost their attention over time. Can the bridge to WASM contribute to this or is that digressing from the topic?

I think you are mistaking Flow unmaintained for Flow actively maintained.

Hack and Flow are also written in OCaml.

So... you're referring to flow?

It seems like Facebook doesn't have problem with releasing open source project [0] while keeping centralised control over it.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/flow

Facebook uses OCaml professionally, for [Flow](https://github.com/facebook/flow), their typechecker for JavaScript, and [Pyre](https://github.com/facebook/pyre-check), their typechecker for Python.