[jsamuel]

At ServerPilot, we decided early on not to support HHVM for similar reasons: we could see PHP 7 was going to offer the same performance benefits without the pain, breakage, and downtime of HHVM.

Early on, before PHP 7 was released, we had to explain this to many of our users who use ServerPilot to host WordPress, Magento, Laravel, and other PHP apps. They often thought there was no downside or risk with HHVM, it was as simple as dropping it in as a replacement. Nowadays, with the hype around HHVM dying down, we don't get requests for HHVM support much anymore.

For a huge company like Facebook, HHVM makes a lot of sense. And the existence of HHVM really sped up the PHP 7 development efforts and provided a great benchmark for how fast PHP 7 could be. So, the PHP community should be very grateful to Facebook for that even if HHVM isn't the future of PHP.