I\'ve been playing with HHVM config file and I have yet to be able to make it output any fatal error to the browser. It displays E_NOTICE and E_WARNING but when any E_ERROR
You need to enable the configuration hhvm.server.implicit_flush in your php.ini, then you can send a response body in case of fatal errors. To be able to catch fatal errors with an error handler, you should also enable hhvm.error_handling.call_user_handler_on_fatals.
For details, refer to the github issue on hhvm.