On the Symfony blog they talk about a major milestone the framework has reached: one billion downloads of the components that make up the Symfony framework.

A Symfony unicorn!!? It's real! On September 5th, the Symfony Components crossed a huge landmark: the 1 billionth download! This happened less than one year after the last milestone: 500 million downloads. That's right: the PHP community downloaded the Symfony components more than 500 million times in just one year. That's well over 1 million downloads every day!

There are so many people that have made this possible, and we would like to thank all of you who have supported Symfony: developers, contributors, companies, evangelists and - of course - users! There are now over 80 Symfony packages and 1,500 people have contributed code to these. None of this is possible without your help. Congrats!

The post then talks about the current state of the components (including their download numbers), their backwards compatibility promise and how it relates to the upcoming Symfony 4 release.

On the Symfony blog they've posted an announcement that they've achieved 100% compatibility with HHVM, the virtual machine/engine created by Facebook, in version 2.3 of the framework.

HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance for PHP applications. During these last past months, HHVM and the upcoming PHP 7 version have engaged in an epic battle to become the fastest PHP engine. At Symfony we are thrilled because this fierce competition will ultimately benefit all of us.

The post shows some of the commits that were made towards the effort including the first from Joseph Bielawski and the final push from Nicolas Grekas in pull request 15,146 correcting issues in the Debug, DependencyInjection, Filesystem, Form, HttpFoundation, Process and Routing components.