4 ms·

This isn't true at all. Major functions of WhatsApp are implemented in Erlang and they're actively worked on. Source: Self. Engineer at FB.

• hackerbabz 7y ago
  I thought they use Elixir (like Kotlin :: Java).
  • bdd 7y ago
    Not only WhatsApp but there are no files checked into any Facebook source repository with .ex or .exs suffix and looks like Elixir.
• zerr 7y ago
  They (you) had to modify beam vm heavily though.
  • fouc 7y ago
    WhatsApp did modify Erlang but it's interesting that Elixir/Phoenix was able to hit the same scale on a single server without any such optimizations. [1] [1] https://changelog.com/podcast/208 https://changelog.com/podcast/208 > I wasn’t thinking we could actually get WhatsApp-like scale, because when I read about WhatsApp, they were using FreeBSD and they forked Erlang and made some optimizations, they fine-tuned FreeBSD… So I was thinking that it was gonna be very difficult to try to replicate that kind of scale. > So we were doing extra work, and it was really fulfilling to actually see that with minor changes in our initial best-effort approach with just a few tweaks was able to go to something that was able to get millions of connections. That was incredibly fulfilling to come full circle, and also it’s a great brag slide now, of showing that two million connections chart.
  • rapsey 7y ago
    At that scale you are generally modifying your entire stack or building it from scratch no mater what you are using. Also they were on a pretty old version and a number of their fixes are in Erlang itself now. WhatsApp engineers have been quite clear that using Erlang was a great choice.