On the back of the discussion between Sara Golemon and Phil Sturgeon, I saw this post from Gareth Evans explaining his take on strongly-typed PHP (or SPHP as he calls it).

And yet, this already exists, albeit unreleased, officially unannounced and unfinished as of yet. Hack is a product from the HHVM team, and this is what Sara had to say about it (spanning a few tweets to me and Gareth):

Yeah, Hack is sorta PHP++, which I like to call PHQ (after the string increment operator) or "PHuQ" for short. Details have been leaked in various places, but we're planning to release a bunch of proper documentation and tools soon.

To @garoevans' post: HHVM does this by, well... branching the language. <?php files are "PHP Compat" syntax, <?hh are Hack. Not really a fork, since PHP-syntax is still respected in <?php files, but embracing better coding paradigms through <?hh. Oh, and in case you missed it, Hack also includes Generics, Collections and everything else in that thread.

So there you go. I've only briefly dabbled with HHVM itself, which I won't go into to here because there's tonnes of resources everywhere (including Sara's fantastic Nomad PHP presentation last month!). However, I'm finding Hack very intriguing - it certainly seems like taking PHP closer to a pure OO language.

There's been a few musings about HHVM and/or Hack becoming "PHP6" and the future of the Zend Engine, which is interesting. I don't think HHVM will ever actually become PHP6, but it definitely has a chance, given time and porting the many PHP extensions, to become the de-facto standard for running PHP.

It's also worth mentioning here something called Zephir - and whilst certainly not the same thing as HHVM, is different avenue of attack to improving performance - allowing people to write PHP extensions with a familiar PHP-like Syntax.

2014 is a very exciting year for PHP, and I have no idea where it's going to take us... but I've got a seat at the front.