Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 458 posts

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#271

Post by Solvency »

jadtz wrote: post #221
mrweasel wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty interesting, I wonder if that means that it's build by a team at Instagram, and not Facebook. I'd assume so. I get that Facebook is still a huge success, but I do find it telling that they opted to put Threads under Instagram, rather than Facebook.

I think its pretty obvious they went with Instagram branding, as Facebook branding has been tarnished for a while.

I'm confused.

It's Facebook by Meta. Instagram by Meta. Why isn't it Threads by Meta?

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#272

Post by jajajajajajajaj »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #228
phyrex wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s fully typed and nothing can be merged that doesn’t pass the type checker

What are the benefits of python with types vs a statically typed language like java, golang, etc?

The main “benefit” is that Instagram is written in Python and always has been.

It’s millions of lines of code, you can’t just change it to be Java one day.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#273

Post by Solvency »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #268
Solvency wrote: post #267

Why has everyone on here been comparing Threads to Twitter when threads.com literally says its a Slack alternative for makers ? The product has absolutely nothing to do with a Twitter style social network.

Threads.com is not Threads.net. The latter owned by Instagram/Meta.

Jesus Christ this is confusing.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#274

Post by depereo »

rewmie wrote: post #266
rafark wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook had hundreds of millions daily active users before writing a compiler.

> Facebook had hundreds of millions daily active users before writing a compiler. In other words, Facebook felt compelled to write a compiler when they had hundreds of millions daily active users.

If you have hundreds of millions of daily active users then needing to write a compiler isn't the end of the world.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#275

Post by c7DJTLrn »

pjmlp wrote: post #115
seanp2k2 wrote: post #110

For the “Python isn’t fast enough for production backend” crowd from the same company that brought you the largest social network built on PHP + MySQL.

You mean the company that had to create their two PHP implementations and a translator to C++, to actually scale?

Guess I'll just write my next project in Bash then, after all, if it's a good idea they will come right? Execution can wait until you've got a few hundred mil.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#276

Post by Yoric »

o1y32 wrote: post #38
Yoric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My few years of personal experience of using Python with even small-ish scale professional projects have been... underwhelming so far. I wonder how Meta (and Google, and all the others who write serious Python code) manage to keep things running – and I'm not talking (only) of performance, but largely of bugs. My personal suspicion is that the secret sauce is simply to have a sufficient budget to hire an army of code…

I cannot find any substance in your comment. At minimum it should provide some rough examples instead of simply "underwhelming".

Well, I wasn't planning to spend time criticizing Python. I think that we all know roughly its pros and cons, no need to add fire.

My questions remain, though.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#277

Post by IshKebab »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #143
seanp2k2 wrote: post #110

For the “Python isn’t fast enough for production backend” crowd from the same company that brought you the largest social network built on PHP + MySQL.

Quite often, the choice of language is failing to see the forest for the trees. Saving nanoseconds or cycles because you chose C++ over Python pales in comparison to milliseconds spent at network barriers reading from a cache service or database

The difference between C++ and Python is not nanoseconds.

And I have definitely seen projects fail due - in part - to language choice. Of course projects can succeed in almost any language but that doesn't mean the language choice is irrelevant.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#279

Post by Yoric »

ambivalence wrote: post #22
Yoric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My few years of personal experience of using Python with even small-ish scale professional projects have been... underwhelming so far. I wonder how Meta (and Google, and all the others who write serious Python code) manage to keep things running – and I'm not talking (only) of performance, but largely of bugs. My personal suspicion is that the secret sauce is simply to have a sufficient budget to hire an army of code…

In short: static analysis, unit tests, staging environments, effective log aggregation. The first one is a big productivity booster as it shows you bugs before you commit them. Here's a post about this, not exactly new but still describing the general principles very well: https://instagram-engineering.com/static-analysis-at-scale-a...

Thanks. For context, I happen to have a PhD in static analysis, so I'm not entirely stranger to the general idea :)

Sadly, all the attempts I've had with static analysis in Python screamed that while the language and tools make a valiant effort at supporting a reasonable set of annotations, 8-9 years after PEP 484, the libraries are simply not yet ready for it (not even, in many cases, the standard library).

Unit tests, staging environment, effective log aggregation are all important tools, of course.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#280

Post by nologic01 »

No matter what the true combination of reasons, this is a massive endorsement of the python ecosystem.

Its an interesting dynamic: popularity draws attention, attention helps adress pain points, this makes the platform more attractive and the popularity increases...

Post reply on HN