My thoughts exactly; this is really not too exciting.  (I will disagree that web apps are never CPU-bound.  That has always been the bottleneck for me.)<p>I haven't seen the source code yet, but I think Chicken Scheme did everything HipHop does but many years ago.  And, there are some hard problems to solve when implementing Scheme, notably handling continuations.  PHP is much simpler in comparison.<p>I do see good things coming out of this project, though.  As people are enticed by the biggest temptress in computing, speed, they'll learn to run and deploy web applications that aren't as simple as "ftp this HTML file to a directory".  Once PHP's only advantage over other languages is gone, and developers realize that it wasn't that big of an advantage, they'll switch to better programming languages.  Then we can forget PHP ever happened, and the field can move on!