NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary A. Mort]

I recently learned about Travis CI[in the past 6 months] which removed a 
large number of testing issues I've faced in the past[PHPUnit has 
changed so much from version to version, that at times one PHP package's 
tests require a specific downlevel PHPUnit to run, while another 
required a different downlevel PHPUnit...leading me to frustration when 
working on both at the same time!]

With the combination of Composer, Github, and Travis CI - I can set it 
up to install a specific version of PHPUnit and whenever I push a 
commit, Travis runs the tests for me....much easier.

So when Travis CI added support for selecting HHVM as a PHP Version I 
was curious on how it compared to regular PHP.   Grabbing my favorite 
PHP framework[Joomla] I created a new branch and added hhvm as a PHP 
version.

The biggest problem I ran into was that the current hhvm release is very 
downlevel on features which caused a lot problems in the unit tests[a 
lot of Image processing tests blew up].    Fortunately, Facebook 
maintains an apt installable copy of hhvm-nightly, so with some extra 
build scripts I was able to set up some conditional apt-get scripts to 
make sure hhvm-nightly is installed: 
https://github.com/garyamort/joomla-framework/tree/hvmmaster/build/travis/scripts

I also had to heavily modify the travis configuration:
https://github.com/garyamort/joomla-framework/blob/hvmmaster/.travis.yml
I learned that with travis, many of the commands for each 
stage[before_install, install, before_script, and script] are at the 
same time.   So if your running 3 scripts for the "install" stage, they 
run at the same time, but if/when one of them fails the error is 
reported as being from the script started first and still running.

IE: your running a.sh, b.sh, and c.sh
a.sh finishes executing
b.sh and c.sh are still running
c.sh aborts with a vague error message

Travis reports the error message as coming from b.sh and aborts the job.

Plus if c.sh depends on something b.sh is configuring, it will fail.  So 
careful placement of scripts to ensure that they finish in the correct 
sequence is important.

There were a few interoperability problems between Composer and 
hhvm-nightly when it came to how the version string was formatted - I 
reported it to both groups and the facebook team were very quick about 
reaching out to the Composer dev to find out what version string format 
he preferred and then they updated their build process to produce it.

With all the major issues taken care of, it was just a process of fixing 
a handful of little incompatibilities to get the test to run.

In the end, I found it rather impressive that hhvm took about half the 
time to execute.  Generally it took PHP almost 6 minutes to run all the 
unit tests.  HHVM was able to run them in under 3 minutes.

Even if you don't plan on using hhvm for production - adding it to your 
unit testing is very beneficial.  Most of the changes I had to make in 
order to get the unit tests to run were not differing published 
features[the string access as an array thing for example] - but instead 
they were broken/undocumented features in PHP 5.3/5.4.   For example, 
PHP has some VERY strange ways of handling using private methods for 
autoloaders.   Because the documented autoload features specify that you 
must use public methods for autoloaders, HHVM adhered to the spec and 
thus would break there.

It's somewhat like how you can use Clang to compile your C code to find 
all the bad coding practices which directly contradict the C standards 
but work anyway if you compile your code with GCC.  Clang has added a 
bunch of flags to allow code to be compiled in the "broken" gcc 
supported way - but if you use it in it's default config you can find 
all your "broken but working" code.

Just curious if anyone has anything actually in production using hhvm?  
Or even just playing around with it.

-Gary
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