3 ms·

It's nothing more complex than 100,000s of other apps out there. Yet somehow they managed to create 18k classes? Scale is handled at the back-end.

throwaway698769 10y ago
You are completely right. As a small-company person who migrated a few years ago to one of the Big Four, I can confirm that almost every time someone tells you about "scale" they are bullshitting you. Most developers on those companies either do not deal with scale at all (anyone dealing with front end stuff) or do so by using abstractions which allow them to ignore scale (99% of developers). But scale sounds sexy so everybody pretends they have something to do with it. And it sounds better than "bloat" which is what they really mean. The other variant of "scale" is "I have this single-computer application running on X hundred thousand servers" or some ambarrasingly parallel problem of that sort. Then they will claim boldly that something that has a 0,0001% chance of happening "happens multiple times a day here" which sounds impressive until you realize that that thing has no impact on the SLA and you get saved by the load balancer so it isn't particularly important anyway. The 1% of people who work on real problems in the area don't need to brag on the Internet about "scale" because they are too busy working.
Bahamut 10y ago
That's not quite true - frontend has to scale for features.
mercer 10y ago
I can't immediately think of any apps that are just as complex as Facebook's, but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. Could you give me some examples (honest question)?
- nailer 10y ago
  Unreal Engine.
  - Psilidae 10y ago
    Based on their documentation—which, albeit, I know has many classes omitted—Unreal Engine has ~6900 classes. That number probably gets greatly multiplied, though, if you count generated classes.
    - nailer 10y ago
      And it's managed in git.
      - bluesilver07 10y ago
        I can't find the link, but I remember an Epic engineer saying that they use Perforce internally and do a 2 way sync with Github.
        richardboegli 10y ago
        Correct, it is managed in Perforce and MIRRORED onto Github.
- bluesilver07 10y ago
  I'd think that the Google+, Google Photos, the Twitter apps are at at least 75% of the complexity of the Facebook app.

throwaway698769 10y ago

You are completely right. As a small-company person who migrated a few years ago to one of the Big Four, I can confirm that almost every time someone tells you about "scale" they are bullshitting you. Most developers on those companies either do not deal with scale at all (anyone dealing with front end stuff) or do so by using abstractions which allow them to ignore scale (99% of developers). But scale sounds sexy so everybody pretends they have something to do with it. And it sounds better than "bloat" which is what they really mean. The other variant of "scale" is "I have this single-computer application running on X hundred thousand servers" or some ambarrasingly parallel problem of that sort. Then they will claim boldly that something that has a 0,0001% chance of happening "happens multiple times a day here" which sounds impressive until you realize that that thing has no impact on the SLA and you get saved by the load balancer so it isn't particularly important anyway. The 1% of people who work on real problems in the area don't need to brag on the Internet about "scale" because they are too busy working.

Bahamut 10y ago

That's not quite true - frontend has to scale for features.

mercer 10y ago

I can't immediately think of any apps that are just as complex as Facebook's, but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. Could you give me some examples (honest question)?

nailer 10y ago
Unreal Engine.
- Psilidae 10y ago
  Based on their documentation—which, albeit, I know has many classes omitted—Unreal Engine has ~6900 classes. That number probably gets greatly multiplied, though, if you count generated classes.
  - nailer 10y ago
    And it's managed in git.
    - bluesilver07 10y ago
      I can't find the link, but I remember an Epic engineer saying that they use Perforce internally and do a 2 way sync with Github.
      - richardboegli 10y ago
        Correct, it is managed in Perforce and MIRRORED onto Github.
bluesilver07 10y ago
I'd think that the Google+, Google Photos, the Twitter apps are at at least 75% of the complexity of the Facebook app.