Marco Alka

Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor

Jan 12, 2017

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.

Richard Hurt

I make IT simple!

Jan 16, 2017

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)

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