remove hhvm ci task

[rdeutz]

Summary of Changes

It seems hhvm gets lower support from the PHP Community and with PHP7 there isn't really a need for it. So we are removing the ci task and with it any doubts if we support hhvm or not.

[brianteeman]

Should we also state that hhvm is not supported on the requirements page

[rdeutz]

@brianteeman yes, if this is merged we should make our documentation consistent

[brianteeman]

I have tested this item ✅ successfully on 16ab54f

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_{This comment was created with the J!Tracker Application at issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/16232.}

[wilsonge]

Do we state in the docs we do support it?

[rdeutz]

atm it doesn't say we are supporting it, but maybe we should say that we don't support it to make it crystal clear or saying if it runs fine but if not we don't care

[brianteeman]

Its not like the mysql compatible databases which we dont explicitly say we support as hhvm is known to be different so we should explicitly state something like "not supported but may work"

My 20c

[brianteeman]

For reference in the future if someone sees this and wonders why
http://symfony.com/blog/symfony-4-end-of-hhvm-support

[photodude]

in addition to passing our unit tests, we did have one user who did local testing on hhvm after the unit test were passing

Basically, Joomla CMS may work on HHVM but not supported. (kind of like mariaDB and other mysql variants)

There are 2 major reasons that Laravel, Symfony, Doctrine, CakePHP, MongoDB, PHPUnit, Composer, Twig, Silex, and Swiftmailer, etc have all dropped support for HHVM (that is something like 75% of the php market use has dropped support). 1) HHVM has needed to fix some big compatibility issues and 2) HHVM needs to improve their support when library devs report issues. With most of the big libraries moving to PHP7 only issues like HHVM and PHP7 differ on type annotations on internal functions (rtrim in particular) hhvm 7198 block the ability to test HHVM in HHVM's PHP7 mode since composer is unable to function due to that bug. Additionally, Cpanel and the like have never placed HHVM into the standard hosting options with PHP; resulting in limited user adoption with only places like Etsy on VMs or dedicated servers using HHVM. Add to that Travis testing of HHVM has tended to be outdated or slow and the new trusty container on travis is broken with mysql; testing is often the first step to support.

Personally, I hope that HHVM gets their act together so we and others can consider supporting HHVM again but at the moment it's a lame duck with little progress for those not programming with hiphop.