I've looked at this article- HipHop PHP (was Hyper PHP by Facebook)
However, recently come across this Facebook Speeds Development With “HipHop Virtual Machine”, A 60% Faster PHP Executor
Does anyone have details on this? Is it worth exploring for a PHP developer?
You can find the details in the article linked in the article you linked:
hphpc is in essence a traditional static compiler that converts PHP→AST→C++→x64. We have long been keenly aware of the limitations to static analysis imposed by such a dynamic language as PHP, not to mention the risks inherent in developing software with hphpi and deploying with hphpc. Our experiences with hphpc led us to start experimenting with dynamic translation to native machine code, also known as just-in-time (JIT) compilation. A dynamic translator can observe data types as the program executes, and generate type-specialized machine code.
The type-specialized machine code runs faster. Unless you are the size of FB, you do not need this. Use APC or memcached and more traditional approaches to scaling out.