> as well as the first iteration of Facebook Messenger I was told, from someone familiar with the project at the time, that the first iteration was done with e

> as well as the first iteration of Facebook Messenger I was told, from someone familiar with the project at the time, that the first iteration was done with ejabberd, which is written in Erlang, with the main purpose of bootstrapping it. Erlang was not really in consideration in the long term at the time. Not sure if it changes your take personally but hopefully adding some context helps. I am always glad to be corrected if wrong. :) I wrote about Techempower in the past. In a nutshell, the Erlang runtime does plenty of assumptions that you would absolutely use in production but which become overhead in benchmarks like these. Previous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22894191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22894191 > My personal takeaway, which seems to be mirrored by every big company, is that the ecosystem just isn't worth the investment. Your experience was guided by a decent amount of time and I actually appreciate you invested in learning it before deciding it wasn't worth it. However, I doubt every big company had the same takeaway for two reasons: 1. I doubt every big company went through the same experience (i.e. have they learned about the ecosystem?) to mirror the takeaway 2. The every quantifier is provably false, since there is Facebook/Whatsapp, PepsiCo, Klarna, Ericsson, Nokia, Mozilla, Cisco, and others using the ecosystem in production and/or investing on it (plus at least another company from FAANG using it at multiple projects)