On JavaWorld.com there's a new article posted about an update Facebook has made to their HipHop virtual machine (HHVM) version that is supposed to execute PHP nine times faster than its normal rate.

Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems.

An engineering manager for Facebook pointed out the goal of the update - "to make PHp run really, really quickly." The HHVM compiles down the PHP code into C and executes it directly, removing the need for the PHP interpreter.

HHVM is the next step for Facebook. Under development for about three years, HHVM actually works on the same principle as the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). HHVM has a JIT (just-in-time) compiler that converts the human readable source code into machine-readable byte code when it is needed. (The previous HipHop, renamed HPHPc, has now been retired within Facebook.)

You can find out more about the HipHop virtual machine over on Facebook.