I heard with hip hop you cannot easily use your typical C php plugins?

I think that's going to be difficult, at least initially. It looks like you at least get a MySQL client though, and it can run WordPress with only a few changes: http://www.hiphop-php.com/wp/?p=113

This may be a blessing in disguise of sorts. Many of the plugins that ship with PHP are the cause of it's poor reputation.

If a VM makes them design sane consistent and useable versions of those plugins from the ground up PHP may be improved as a result.

Hehehe so true. We use some odbc driver at my company and it had major memory leaks / seg faults. I had to compile debug versions and test it out to figure out what was going on. That being said, some PHP modules are really great and would be hard to live without. I need mysql, memcached, apc, json_decode, etc... I guess the extensions I've written myself I could rewrite to some hip hop spec?

They have most of those it appears, not including apc which shouldn't be necessary anymore, however I can't find the spec's to write extensions.

> not including apc which shouldn't be necessary anymore

APC is a bit more than an opcode cache. It can be used like memcache, although restricted to the machine it's running on. It's my understanding that it is a part of hhvm?