Facebook has announced “Hip Hop”, a PHP to C++ compiler stack that they hope will overcome some of the scaling and speed issues associated with PHP apps.  The video above lays out the reasons they started the project and the types of things they want to accomplish with it.  As a PHP developer, this project is of great interest to me.  Most encouraging is the fact that someone other than Zend, the primary developers of PHP, is putting significant resources toward the popular language for Web apps.  The project is set to be released to the open source community in the near future.