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Google App Engine originally used a custom containment strategy. Back in the day, I was on the team that added Python 2.7 support to App Engine and we were exp
by bquinlan 5y ago
Google App Engine originally used a custom containment strategy.
Back in the day, I was on the team that added Python 2.7 support to App Engine and we were experimenting with a different containment approach.
But Python is a complex language to support - you need to support WSGI, to support dynamic loading (for C extensions), a reasonably performant file system (Python calls `stat` about a billion times before actually importing a file), etc.
So our original runtime was actually Brainf#ck. So, at once point, if you had guessed that Google supported it, you could have written your (simple) webapp in Brainf#ck and Google would have scaled it up to hundreds of machines if needed ;-)
- crazypython 5y agoWhat?
- apeace 5y agoI was also really confused by this comment until I re-read it later. At first I thought OP meant “we wrote out container runtime in Brainfuck,” but what I think they meant was “we first deployed Brainfuck support in order to test our new runtime on something simpler than Python.”
- vangelis 5y agoWhy though?
- thequux 5y agoAw darn! Around that time, I was at Google, and there was a thread on eng-misc (or possibly eng-misc-mtv; it's been lost to the sands of time) with people contributing programs that would flip a virtual coin 50 times and output the sequence of heads and tails. I contributed one in BF because I had some spare time waiting for a deploy job, and I've been joking since that I've "written BF code professionally". And now you tell me that that could have been for real. :-(
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]