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>>> WhatsApp was built almost entirely in Erlang + Mnesia. I honestly don't think they could have done it in PHP + Postgres. They could have done it in Java, C
by user5994461 9y ago
>>> WhatsApp was built almost entirely in Erlang + Mnesia. I honestly don't think they could have done it in PHP + Postgres.
They could have done it in Java, C# or Go.
PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby are terrible for fast network applications.
- defined 9y ago> They could have done it in Java, C# or Go. Maybe. But I think with much greater difficulty. None of Java, C#, or Go has the built-in distributed processing capability of Erlang. The last time I looked into it, WhatsApp's infrastructure consisted of 256 2-node clusters, each node of which was capable of supporting between one and two million concurrently open TCP sockets. The 2-node clusters were combined into (IIRC) 16 "islands", some of which were geographically remote, and each of which communicated with the other using a distribution protocol written by WhatsApp in Erlang.