Making use of C++ to speed up PHP

Question

I saw this post on Sitepoint quoting a statement by Rasmus Lerdorf which goes (according to Sitepoint) as follows:

How can you make PHP fast? Well, yo

Answer 1

Slow is subjective term. Facebook (the biggest site online) is built on PHP and I never heard them complain. In the contrary in their pursuit of speed the developed and recently released HipHop If you are going for ultrafast PHP this is where you should focus. C++ for web is kind of impractical because it needs to be compiled and it will slowdown the development process.

Because: Why are so many web languages interpreted rather than compiled?

http://www.bitsandbuzz.com/article/compiled-web-vs-interpreted-web/