If Facebook were built today which tech stack would it use?

This is not original question on the Internet, but all the answers there are not really helpful. I'm interested in other people opinions. So, what do you think, which tech stack is most appropriate for building such feature rich application that serves more than billion users?

Some of the things to consider are that backend languge should be fast and efficient. Which data storage paradigm and/or specific tech would you recommend? Cache technologies and techniques?

Also, there are a lot of real time capabilities such as chat, notifications, feed updates, comments (now you can even see when somebody is writing reply, before he/she even posted). Should real time stuff work via web sockets or classic AJAX with polling? Can web sockets scale to hundreds of millions scale without major downsides?

For the frontend stuff, should it be "one website fits all" regarding fitting content for all screen sizes, or to have separate versions for various screen sizes? What about UI, should it use some library or framework like Vue, React or Angular? Or maybe something else? What about rendering, should it be rendered on client or server rendered first?

What about image processing, video processing, live streaming?

You don't have to comment on everything, but explanation why would you pick something would be appreciated. I really want to see what people think and maybe focus on learning some of the stuff from the answers.

Definitely they would use rust. I'm not just a Rust fun boy, I found this in twitter: https://onesignal.com/blog/rust-at-onesignal/

well a company in the beginning esp one started as a project in a university probably will go for a RAD language and not Rust :) but I love the idea though GO would be more likely, simpler, I guess.

api/database layer : I might go with nodejs + aws services or elixir/erlangVM.

Database : I might go with mongodb/sql . And elastic search for fulltext searching

application Layer : i might go with python or GO.

web frontend : React js or phoenix elixir

mobile : react native or traditional ios/android devlopemnt

i'm just curious :D without facebook developing react where do they get react ? :D ...

:D well first build react first then building facebook UI is easy :)

Eternal return

It was and always will be built with PHP. Forever. And ever.

Not on PHP right now .. :P

@atulquest93 sure they are - just not PHP distro'd by php.net - their on HHVM or whatever the custom flavor of the month is. It's still PHP. C by Microsoft is still the same C by Borland (throw back friday?) - just with some "stuff" changed.

Backend Language(s)

I guess, that they might think about using Go for their front-end facing backend, since it is highly concurrent and better suited for the job than other languages. They might use Python for other tasks, like data mining, data analysis and artificial intelligence, though. Some of those calculations will definitely be offloaded to GPGPUs, which adds in OpenCL or Cuda.

Client-Server Communication

Concerning the polling, I they'd probably go for sockets from the start, which allows them real-time notifications, updates and chat while having close to zero overhead (no HTTP request with headers, TLS handshake, etc.), meaning a better performance and less CPU-costs for handling said overhead.

Front-End

Facebook's philosophy is "Move Fast, Break Things", so I guess even if all of the tech which exists today (React included) would still be available, they would do their own things. I mean, it's a company which literally welcomes you with the word "HACK". Headquarters is located in "Hacker Way". What else can you expect? But it would be quite close to React, because that's what they need. I guess they would do backend-rendering (taken from cache) for the initial page, then offloaded rendering to the client (client capacity is free, after all)

Image/Video Processing

If I had to create something like that today, I would probably go for C or C++ with OpenCV, because of the performance per resource usage and ease of development. Since we are talking about FaceBook, they might, however, do their own thing, again, which is more tailored to their specific needs. Again, GPGPU here, so OpenCL or Cuda will also be used.

I think Go is a great option for this type of thing. Google originally built the language to support large projects that needed many hands, which fits right up Facebook's alley. However, I think another good option would be Rust. It fits the bill almost as well as Go does, however, the Rust community is much more hacker friendly and would appeal to Facebook devs much more so than Go's ivory tower approach.

In fact, I would say that Facebook devs would love the opportunity to help make Rust something that works well for them. And the Rust community would love to have the help. Google, on the other hand, has shown that it just doesn't care much about the community and what they need.

@RNHurt

However, I think another good option would be Rust.

I agree and I almost wrote it into my post. However, Rust does not only offer superior features, which stem from research conducted over the past 20 years, but also makes developers learn a lot. Rust makes developers into "super-developers". All that research has to be applied, though, or the compiler will only produce error logs. Rust requires you to build stable, robust, future-proof code. Something like that is very frustrating and I do not think it goes well with the culture of hacking (which more often than not results in quick workaround solutions with lots of bugs and memory leaks just to try out some idea; that's why Facebook needs so many devs who fix all that code :D)

Python. I think I heard they were increasingly big on Python.

Is that true? I thought Python would be a performance bottleneck for very high load servers like theirs. Python itself as a language syntax is okay but its runtime is really slow compared to new languages like Go/Elixir or of course C++

Here is the thread that gave me that impression - reddit.com/r/Python/comments/5l9om5/mark_zuckerbe…

estevan carlos benson

"Beware the advice of successful people - they do not often want company" is an adage that might hold as much weight in the development world as it does in business...

I guess not react ;D ....

I think I will go for Elixir for polling, chat etc.

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