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LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

engineering.fb.com

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Re: LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

#151

Post by monocasa »

lord_braleigh wrote: post #143
MikusR wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait! Somebody found evidence of them listening to your microphone?

Still no. If an iOS app is using your microphone while backgrounded, your phone's taskbar at the top of the screen will be red. iOS does not allow apps to use the microphone while the screen is off. The microphone thing is a myth fueled by paranoia and confirmation bias. FB already has plenty of data on you and doesn't need to run NLP on everything you say in order to show you relevant ads.

> iOS does not allow apps to use the microphone while the screen is off.

Isn't the screen off in nearly all of the legitimate uses of a microphone, ie. "I'm replicating the ux of a phone call in my chat app"?

Re: LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

#152

Post by WhyNotHugo »

I don't know anyone who uses Messenger, yet, I've heard of people moving to specific countries where it's the de facto and you can't have a social life without it.

I'm also aware of how iMessages and SMS are used in the US, yet this is very US-specific, and I don't believe any other country uses SMS.

For Chinese people, WeChat is the standard, and what pretty much anyone uses.

In Argentina and the Netherlands (and I believe much of the EU), WhatsApp is ubiquitous.

Yet, I don't know a single person who uses either SMS or Messenger, or iMessages.

So what truly fascinates me, is how different companies put so much work into developing such sophisticated messaging apps, but they're all reinventing the wheel and each consumed in different regions -- I think nobody would have guesses years ago that we'd have so many different apps used in different countries, and not at all inter-operating with each other.

Re: LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

#153

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

karatestomp wrote: post #81
saagarjha wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I was instrumental in making Messenger twice as fast?”

Well yeah, but first someone has to get the credit for creating some "high-productivity" hog of a framework to make it slow, then someone else can come tear all that crap out and claim they made it fast.

Why not be both people? "I made React and I made Messenger twice as fast [by ditching it]"

Re: LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

#155

Post by ajconway »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #141
jconley wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see it. It's pretty easy to hit that much code when you include your own code for things as trivial as a JSON parser rather than leveraging what the native SDK provides (which was alluded to in the article). It sounds like they had a bit of Not Invented Here syndrome going on and this rewrite addressed a lot of that. It also sounds like they had a bunch of systems (probably different teams even) doing similar t…

> But, all that being said, it still has a ton of features. It's not your father's IRC client sending text around and failing to transfer files through NAT/firewalls. Meh. It displays text, pictures, and videos. That's about it. This is just Messenger we're talking about here, not the full-blown Facebook app. The only state to keep track of is "Have you received message UUID?". > And they also had their own UI framew…

Well, browsers just display pictures and text, yet to build Chrome one needs to download gigabytes of code. Databases just keep an ordered list of records on disc. Compilers just look at the code and produce another code. Web servers only need to accept connections and respond with some data.

Image editors are the simplest — they just let you paint with colored pixels.

Re: LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

#156

Post by _bxg1 »

derefr wrote: post #142
_bxg1 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that includes payments, camera effects, extensive social integrations, stories, GIFs, reactions, games, polls, voice recording, calling, video chat To be fair, this is part of the problem ^

It's an inner-platform effect, certainly, but not one FB asked for. If they were allowed by the app-stores to factor their app into separate "plugins" that were auto-installed when a friend used them in a chat, the way iMessage does, they'd probably do that. But they're not allowed to have their own seamless plugin ecosystem, so into the monolith everything goes.

No, they specifically used Messenger as a way of pushing all of those different things on its massive install-base. Anything that distances them from the user in any way would compromise on that objective.

Re: LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

#157

Post by on_and_off »

ska wrote: post #18

Not sure how much impact this will have, most of the people I know and have discussed this with fall into two camps: people who use FB a lot an will put up with a bad mobile client, and people who don't want FB on their phone, ever. I have to go years back to think of someone who told me they just couldn't take the bad UX of the clients so they deleted it.

I don't think that just because people don't complain about it it has no effect.

re app size : Google has already published stats urging apps to optimize their size as much as possible since it has direct effects on acquisition.

I suspect that long download times lead to more errors + more wait time before you can use the app = more likely that the user will abandon its current task and

Same with slow app or ui patterns that don't fit with the platform = easier to lose users in the first crucial minutes.

Re: LightSpeed: Rewriting Messenger’s codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler app

#160

Post by pottertheotter »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #152

I don't know anyone who uses Messenger, yet, I've heard of people moving to specific countries where it's the de facto and you can't have a social life without it. I'm also aware of how iMessages and SMS are used in the US, yet this is very US-specific, and I don't believe any other country uses SMS. For Chinese people, WeChat is the standard, and what pretty much anyone uses. In Argentina and the Netherlands (and I…

I'm in the US. SMS / Apple Messages seems to be the default for everyone I interact with. I use Messenger sometimes, but usually only when someone else initiates.

My favorite is using Apple Messages since I can send/receive from any of my Apple devices. I use macOS for other reasons, but being able to send a text from my computer is awesome.

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