I remember someone from Facebook saying that ( can't find the link ATM ) when HPHP was being built there was a competing project to trans-compile PHP to Java. In the end they compared the performance and found that the C++ was faster and went with it. Is it true ?

If it is, I wonder how they feel now that they have given up speed improvements and built a VM in search of other advantages. At least if they had chosen the JVM they could have taken advantage of interoperability that JVM provides with other languages to convert at least part of their code base to JVM languages, thereby possibly improving maintainability.