"Hack" the new programming language by Facebook

Facebook has recently released a new programming language called "Hack". It contains the best of the two worlds of static and dynamic languages.  Meaning software developers using “Hack” can have all the speed of a dynamic language and yet catch their mistakes before runtime like a traditional static language.

It is based on PHP, but unlike PHP it does not require as many servers or as much code for maintaining large websites like Facebook. Also it is very easy to manage the code and debug the errors in “Hack”. One of the best things about Hack is it can seamlessly integrate over existing PHP files.

Syntactically Hack is very much similar to PHP, and replicates much of the features and functions of PHP. But it also has a built-in static typing feature, which makes it mandatory for the programmer to define the data type for all variables before the program can be run or compiled. This helps to reduce extra work hour by reducing run time errors.

Over the past year, Facebook has migrated all of its PHP based code into Hack. Now they have made the language open-source, which means anybody can use it and help to improve it. At present Hack can only be run on Facebook’s HHVM (Hip Hop Virtual machine) virtual machine.