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Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

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Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#401

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

pjmlp wrote: post #382
DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? A company is trying to streamline their process and save costs? Is there any large company at all that hasn't invested in making their tool chain better? You talk about it like they are a failure. Lol

Costs that wouldn't have happened in first place if a scripting language hadn't been chosen in first place.

Please tell me what language they should have written it in then?

They have a incredibly successful company. What did ruby do to hurt you personally.

This whole line is co oketely irrational. You want thier webapp written in assembly?

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#402

Post by ericbarrett »

ninkendo wrote: post #394
9dev wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we backed it all up, every day, in But… how? Considering all the transactions in flight, and everything? And did you ever Test disaster recovery with that setup? I’ve worked on relatively big projects, but FAANG engineering is like some entirely different field of software engineering. Fascinating.

To expand on this question, I'm wondering how useful daily backups even are for a site like Facebook. I mean, of _course_ you need them, but also, something about reverting all of FB to a state 24 hours ago seems disastrous even if it works. I can't imagine that it's an acceptable thing in anything but an absolute emergency. Imagine every single facebook user got rewound in time to the previous day, every message sen…

We live-streamed the binlogs (what MySQL calls its WAL) to the backup infrastructure, check out the ORC article I posted elsewhere.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#403

Post by pdimitar »

jononomo wrote: post #387
anayak wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that is technically correct, they haven't been running vanilla PHP for quite some time - it's jitted into x86 and run natively on the machine. It's also pretty extensively optimized. And the VM that does the jitting is all C++. Their MySQL deployment is also an internal fork that's been heavily modified for scalability (storage/compute separation, sharding, RocksDB based storage engine instead of InnoDB, Raft f…

While you're technically correct that they aren't running vanilla PHP, the main takeaway here is that if you want to ultimately want to scale to billions of users then you should probably use vanilla PHP, or maybe Python.

I'm not seeing how is that the takeaway btw, mind elaborating?

I'd think the same or bigger performance benefits can be reaped if you just start with stuff like OCaml / Haskell / Golang / Rust from the get go.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#405

Post by jononomo »

pdimitar wrote: post #403
jononomo wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're technically correct that they aren't running vanilla PHP, the main takeaway here is that if you want to ultimately want to scale to billions of users then you should probably use vanilla PHP, or maybe Python.

I'm not seeing how is that the takeaway btw, mind elaborating? I'd think the same or bigger performance benefits can be reaped if you just start with stuff like OCaml / Haskell / Golang / Rust from the get go.

My point is that they started with vanilla PHP and then had the most successful scaling story of all time -- so if someone else wants to follow in their footsteps then they should go with what is tried and true.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#407

Post by winrid »

sgt wrote: post #378
winrid wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't give Django enough praise. I never thought I'd be writing Python. I've mostly used Node, Java, and Rust, with about 12yrs experience now. Only about one year with Python and Django recently. I am so much more productive than anything else I've tried. Using anything else feels like a mistake for web apps or CRUD apis. I also use type hints. I use Django + django-ninja + django-unicorn for dynamic UIs. Building…

Is django-unicorn similar to htmx?

Unicorn is like htmx specific to Django. It reminds me more of Hotwire or Meteor. Very productive! Not 1.0 yet, but I'm happily using it in prod.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#408

Post by super_flanker »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #316
super_flanker wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but Google is the slowest.

Why do you say that?

It could be different for other teams, but in my team we spend a lot of time writing design docs, discussing new features (which we never end up implementing), taking a lot of time in code reviews, making sure that public changes are backward compatible. Hence at the end producing very little output and wasting tons of time in the due process.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#409

Post by preseinger »

zackees wrote: post #390
preseinger wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think anybody really claims python can't be used to build large software the claim is usually more about how the maintenance costs are just way higher versus a statically typed language

But is that true if the dynamically typed language has type annotations?

it's a spectrum, of course, but imo yes -- i don't want types to be opt-in at compile time, i want them to be mandatory

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#410

Post by Tainnor »

lightbendover wrote: post #338
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They ended up compiling PHP to assembly! Facebook is a company that will go to ridiculous lengths to avoid rewrites.

Every company should go to ridiculous lengths to avoid rewrites. Rewrites of significant tech (as a proxy, lets say 100+ kloc) spell doom. Doom.

Every company? What about banks that have old codebases running on Cobol?

I'm also very skeptical about big bang rewrites, but there are points where you need to migrate off certain tech. Ideally you can make that transition piece by piece though, but that also introduces its own set of problems (now you have two systems and the new one has to inherit some of the baggage of the old one in order to be compatible).

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