Hi!
The last time I saw someone asking if it was faster on
#hhvm the
answer was "not yet". Whether strong typing is a pro or a con of Hack
vs PHP seems like a religious debate that I'll try to stay out of
until the issue is forced. The bits most likely to be of interest in
the short term are the `async` and `await` keywords [0] and possibly
the Continuation class [1] which makes creating generators easier than
the PHP Iterator interface.
PHP 5.5+ has actual generators:
http://php.net/manual/en/language.generators.overview.php
The typed code would not be faster by itself unless some optimizations
actually using type information would be done (not sure if HHVM has such
optimizer), but that would require writing actually typed code which
would not be PHP of course. And this probably will be useful only for
scalar types, since there's not much happening at runtime with
non-scalar typing that can be eliminated by stronger types (for scalar
types, conversions and type branches in operators, parameter passing,
etc. can be eliminated).
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org