Monday, December 15, 2014

Hack Transpiler

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Today, we’re proud to announce a first, experimental release of h2tp, or the “HH (Hack) Transpiler,” a tool which allows projects that have converted from PHP to Hack to still make releases that target the PHP language.

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But transforming Hack code using collections is not merely about using equivalent constructs from the hacklib library. For example, on HHVM, empty Hack collections universally convert to false when used in a boolean context, something a standard PHP object can never do. This means that any arbitrary expression or statement that involves a boolean comparison, or any cast, might invoke this special rule if it involves a collection. So unless the expression being treated as boolean is trivially not a collection, we have to treat it as if it might potentially contain a collection. Hence, we have to be very cautious when making transformations.

[…]

In a few rare cases we actually have to choose not to support a feature. For instance, we do not support Instance variables using literal syntax in the class declaration.

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