Looks like I misinterpreted Rasmus Lerdorf's tone in this, just slightly.

He actually likes HipHop a lot - he's just worried that some devs will skip 'low-hanging fruit"-type optimization because they think that HipHop will be a magic bullet for speed.

Sorry for the hashed metaphors.

If Facebook really wants to improve performance, they should look into dropping Apache in favor of a coroutine-based server.