‘Hack’– a new programming language released by Facebook

March 24, 2014: Facebook has released its new open-source language known as ‘Hack’, which will allow programmers to write codes and avoid common programming errors.

Hack also combines the elements of static web page coding and dynamic languages, such as Ruby or PHP. This new language can be beneficial not ignoring the fact that it can detect the mistakes before the runtime occurs.

Facebook has released Hack as an ‘open-source’, enabling worldwide engineers to bring out more improvements in it. Facebook also expects that this might invite more third-party app creators and contributors in its add-ons as well.

Adding safety nets and language features, ease of code conversion from PHP and the ability to run side-by-side with PHP to allow a gradual progression to total code conversion are some of the variant features of Hack.

Gabi Levi, Facebook Engineer stated that a lot of hard work went into the new language by Facebook engineers. “There are many great, original ideas in Hack, but the majority of time was spent on a lot of fine tuning opposed to having large breakthroughs,” highlighted Levi.

Liberty Voice also reported, ‘The big difference from Hack to PHP is that it allows gradual typing. Until now, hasn’t been a language that allowed gradual typing, which makes the new language also gain industrial strength.’ This feature enables a coder to work on both code snippets and improve either one or both at the same time. Reports also stated, ‘While using Hack, an engineer can add code, refresh the page and immediately see the changes without any delays like there would be if they were solely working with a language such as PHP.’

"Syntactically, Hack is very close to PHP. We allowed it to be possible to run PHP and Hack code side-by-side so that one can convert the language codebase from PHP to Hack," concluded Bryan O’Sullivan, Facebook Engineer.