iOS at Facebook [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#91

Post by zghst » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 7:08 PM UTC

gorkemyurt wrote: post #84

(Another post about React Native) Facebook engineers keep telling everyone that React Native is not used in the main Facebook app. I always wondered what is stopping them from start using it. Perhaps app size is a massive concern? Maybe all this tooling around their app is not really compatible with React Native? Its interesting that they have a ton of legacy Obj-c code (considering that companies started to build ap…

It would probably be a huge pain to migrate all 18,000 classes, tests, tools, etc., over to a React Native app. Also JS has less fine grained tooling for performance profiling (try stepping through JS bytecode for performance analysis, it's a PITA). One day it might get there, but not today. If it works, why change it?

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#92

Post by Narretz » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 7:16 PM UTC

gorena wrote: post #65

xenadu02 wrote: post #52

It's all a bunch of bored engineers looking for ways to be clever but without anyone to take ownership of the codebase. There is absolutely no reason for the Facebook app to be so large and have so many classes. The app itself doesn't do that much.

Yeah, the difference between Facebook and Instagram or Twitter is incremental . They basically do the same stuff, Facebook does a little bit more (although, they entirely removed direct messages). Why is the Facebook app so huge?

I wouldn't be surprised if all the messages code is still in the app.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#93

Post by notNow » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

dmishe wrote: post #76

chuckcode wrote: post #68

Would be interested to see some comparison with the Android app which seems to have most of the same functionality at 1/4 the size with 25MB [1] compared to the 100MB of iOS. Seems like either iOS team at FB has significant cruft laying around or iOS doesn't scale as well as Android and FB is hacking around that. Possibly a bit of both but think it would be an interesting comparison in addition to the war stories abo…

iOS apps are shipped as fat binaries, so for one, part of that 100mb app is duplicated slices of binaries for armv7, arm64 and possibly, but not likely, armv7s. Android apps enjoy bytecode that is getting JIT-ed on install.

Is there any technical justification for this or it's purely economical/financial?

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#94

Post by gorkemyurt » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

zghst wrote: post #91

gorkemyurt wrote: post #84

(Another post about React Native) Facebook engineers keep telling everyone that React Native is not used in the main Facebook app. I always wondered what is stopping them from start using it. Perhaps app size is a massive concern? Maybe all this tooling around their app is not really compatible with React Native? Its interesting that they have a ton of legacy Obj-c code (considering that companies started to build ap…

It would probably be a huge pain to migrate all 18,000 classes, tests, tools, etc., over to a React Native app. Also JS has less fine grained tooling for performance profiling (try stepping through JS bytecode for performance analysis, it's a PITA). One day it might get there, but not today. If it works, why change it?

I am not talking about migrating the whole app but how about for new features? I noticed that they redesigned their friends request page, why not build that with react native?

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#95

Post by rimantas » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #78

sabujp wrote: post #41

what is fb doing for iOS builds and compiles?

https://github.com/facebook/xctool

which is just a wrapper around Apple's xcodebuild.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#96

Post by randomsearch » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:34 PM UTC

brodd wrote: post #79

Am I reading this right, there are interns and engineers running PHP in a debugger on production data? How else would he be able to memorialize his own account and trigger the email?

That is a good point, how did no-one else pick up on that???! It reminds me of engineers where I used to work, who would run through a £0.01 transaction on their credit card to check the changes to the charging system were still working...

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#97

Post by dmishe » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:39 PM UTC

notNow wrote: post #93

dmishe wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS apps are shipped as fat binaries, so for one, part of that 100mb app is duplicated slices of binaries for armv7, arm64 and possibly, but not likely, armv7s. Android apps enjoy bytecode that is getting JIT-ed on install.

Is there any technical justification for this or it's purely economical/financial?

For what, fat binaries? That's pretty much what Mach-O format had from inception under NeXTSTEP, and survived until now. As it was said in the sibling comment, iOS 9 is introducing a way to cut exactly the slice you need for a particular device.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#98

Post by edgyswingset » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:58 PM UTC

gorena wrote: post #61

zeeshanm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I have heard they are now expecting their employees to still move fast, break stuff, but be ready to be penalized for it if you do. So, really, they are encouraging their employees to move at a steady pace with occasional hack nights when there is an upcoming release in the near-term. Facebook is growing old.

Does Facebook pay overtime for "hack nights"?

No, but they make up for it by consistently throwing piles of money at peoples' feet which dwarf the compensation of all but a handful of other jobs.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#99

Post by edgyswingset » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

Narretz wrote: post #92

gorena wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the difference between Facebook and Instagram or Twitter is incremental . They basically do the same stuff, Facebook does a little bit more (although, they entirely removed direct messages). Why is the Facebook app so huge?

I wouldn't be surprised if all the messages code is still in the app.

I've got an alpha of the Facebook for Android app and it's got all of my conversations loaded, including text from the last message. It'll even light up with a red indicator when I get a new message. All the actions start an Intent which launches my Messenger app, though.

So yeah, it's probably all dead code that's still there.

Re: iOS at Facebook [pdf]

#100

Post by thrusong » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #46

It's interesting to note that this presentation strongly contradicts the advice of "The Pragmatic Programmer" and "Clean Code", which are highly respected by many. Does this mean that those books are wrong, or does it mean that Facebook will eventually come to regret their philosophy? Or maybe writing this kind of code is somehow fundamentally different, so the usual wisdom and rules of thumb don't apply. I really do…

They probably have a while to go before they hit the ceiling, if Google's news last week about holding over 2 billion lines of code in one repository means anything.

SRC: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand-...