An initial release of HipHop for PHP, Facebook’s PHP-to-C++ transformer, is finally available for download from Github.

HipHop comes with a number of rather specific requirements, including cmake 2.6 or higher, and several patches that need to be applied to libcurl and libevent in order for the project to compile against them.

Facebook employee (and core PHP contributor) Scott MacVicar announced the availability of the package through a post on the project’s Google group, adding that “while we’re running HipHop in production it might not yet be stable for you.”

HipHop was announced earlier this month; its aim is to speed up PHP-based websites by translating their source code into a self-contained executable. Facebook claims to already be using the software in production to handle over 90% of their traffic.