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

451–458 of 458 posts

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#451

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

pdimitar wrote: post #445
DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main point here is that it's OK to admit at one point that the tech you used for a while has outgrown its usefulness. I understand and recognize some of the downsides but to me they are overblown. My entire complaint is just that you want to say it's outgrown it's usefulness. That is such an absolutist view. And the fact you are even bringing rust into this is crazy. I know C, C++, ASM, GO, and a few other low l…

I just realized we're chatting in 4 separate spots, heh. So let's unite them. > My entire complaint is just that you want to say it's outgrown it's usefulness. That is such an absolutist view. I don't speak for all programmers and IT companies -- and neither do you. We are both right at the same time due to the fact that the world is big. I've been in super small teams (think 3 people) all the way to 50+ and stricter…

> I understand that you are skeptical. A lot of us cope with the fear of missing out by simply denying there's something to miss out on.

I'm just not going to respond to this because it's completely disingenuous when you make statements like that.

You are free to go on with your irrational views and I'll go on ignoring them.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#452

Post by pdimitar »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #451
pdimitar wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just realized we're chatting in 4 separate spots, heh. So let's unite them. > My entire complaint is just that you want to say it's outgrown it's usefulness. That is such an absolutist view. I don't speak for all programmers and IT companies -- and neither do you. We are both right at the same time due to the fact that the world is big. I've been in super small teams (think 3 people) all the way to 50+ and stricter…

> I understand that you are skeptical. A lot of us cope with the fear of missing out by simply denying there's something to miss out on. I'm just not going to respond to this because it's completely disingenuous when you make statements like that. You are free to go on with your irrational views and I'll go on ignoring them.

I took an effort to explain my views thoroughly, and you resorted to calling me disingenuous and irrational.

The part you quoted was the only piece that could be interpreted as seeking conflict -- though it had a more charitable interpretation that you decided to ignore -- and you latched onto that.

Oh well, I tried. Let the future readers judge for themselves.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#453

Post by dang »

georgyo wrote: post #342
lyu07282 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compiling PHP into machine code sounds pretty much impossible, are they using some subset of the language? Does the compiled code use a garbage collector? Or reference counting?

[flagged]

Please follow the site guidelines and edit swipes and putdowns out of your comments here. They're not what this site is for, and destroy what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#454

Post by dang »

lyu07282 wrote: post #399
georgyo wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Such a pedantic response, the archetypical HN comment, I can sense the pretentious smirk on your face while writing it, thanks. Words still mean something, we don't compile a dynamically typed, interpreted scripting language such as PHP for a reason and as it turns out Facebook didn't "compile PHP" either but a dialect of the language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language)

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#455

Post by hello_moto »

ubercore wrote: post #250
hello_moto wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Vanilla Python isn't fast enough so they have to do more: "It's running on Instagram's #Cinder fork that includes a JIT, lazy-loaded modules, pre-compiled static modules, and a bunch of other interesting tweaks against vanilla Python 3.10" From the Tweet. Personally, I don't care what language people use. We all know that if you have money, you can just throw in more servers. Until your CFO and CTO decided that…

> We all know that if you have money, you can just throw in more servers. Definitely not true at Facebook scale. You need to be smart, fast, _and_ throw more servers at it.

I'm speaking on the aspect of Python as web app.

We both know the issue has always been how you store the data. Be it your main data storage, or the need of multiple storages for different use cases, etc.

The app server itself can be implemented in any languages. It's just a data orchestration + transformation logic anyway...

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#456

Post by fmajid »

ericbarrett wrote: post #294
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…

Facebook scaled to ~1b daily actives on MySQL + InnoDB. There was lots of engineering work, like schema sharding (denormalization), automation, plenty of bug fixes and patches for MySQL (most or all contributed back to upstream, from what I remember), and of course a massive caching layer; plus throwing crazy hardware at the problem. Nonetheless the underlying engine was something any MySQL user or admin would have r…

More impressive was how Facebook managed so many MySQL instances with such a small DBA team. The average regional bank probably has more Oracle DBAs managing a handful of databases.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#457

Post by chaoz_ »

patrec wrote: post #381
jerrygenser wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network is slow. So you are waiting on the db for most of a request lifecycle.

Network latency within an AWS AZ is What percentage of python webapps do you think are hitting this as their latency and throughput limit? (Assuming effective DB use of course, i.e. not doing dozens of DB roundtrips to server a single result or getting megabytes of data and filtering on the client etc.)

True... When I measured something similar in a large python app, the biggest chunk of time went into python object serialization/deserialization.

Re: Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

#458

Post by callamdelaney »

smrtinsert wrote: post #300
callamdelaney wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Zuck probably told his team to make this a few weeks ago to annoy Musk. Weird ego thing going on. Python is likely faster to push out an app like this than say rust or even go. Also why spend time optimising something that will be dead in a few months?

!remindme 2 months. After 30 million signups in a day I'm pretty sure we just saw the birth of a new Meta social network.

DAU down 50% already, predictably.
Post reply on HN