[php-maint] HHVM under pkg-php-maint?

[Paul Tarjan]

>e.g. 
>Would extensions built with PHP (Zend Engine) would work on PHP (HHVM) ?

I can talk to the technical parts and hopefully the other's know how the
ecosystem will work. All the common PHP extensions are already present in
HHVM (json, mysql, fileinfo, etc). Eventually we (or our community
members) will port everything that people care about.

I also wrote a source compatibility layer, so you can just take your PHP
extension code and compile it against HHVM headers. It isn't 100% complete
yet, but for simple extensions it is working:
https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/tree/master/hphp/runtime/ext_zend_compat


>If not, do you intend to duplicate the vast variety of PHP extensions
>available in Debian?

If you have a list, I can audit it and say what we support already and
don't. They should be named identically to the zend name:
https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/tree/master/hphp/runtime/ext


>How do we make sure people understand what PHP engine they get ?

Our goal is to be a drop-in replacement so people wouldn't have to notice
other than getting a huge performance win. If they would like to,
programmatically we define a HHVM_VERSION constant that you can use
defined() on if you need to.

Paul