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your comment implies your understanding of the timeline is backwards. they had to do those things after they had gotten hundreds of millions of users.

• fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  Depends on what you consider "far down the road" and what they had to do before writing a compiler and a storage engine. How long did it take until Facebook engineers realised that their technology stack was not the best tool for the job? It definitely wasn't the day when they decided to build a compiler and a storage engine.
  • tyingq 3y ago
    I'm not sure there was really a best tool for the job in 2003-2004 that would have been high-level enough to be productive, and scalable enough to stay mostly as-is. Java, maybe.
    • fauigerzigerk 3y ago
      I agree, and I'm not criticising the choices that Mark Zuckerberg made at the time. But we are no longer facing the same situation he did. We do now have high productivity, high performance language runtimes. And scaling up has become much cheaper (relative to the number of users you can serve). That's why I think it can't hurt to remind people of the great lengths to which Facebook had to go in order to deal with the limitations of their chosen platform.
      • balder1991 3y ago
        Yeah, I kinda don’t agree with the dichotomy of “you either optimize or you build features”. They’re not exclusive. If you understand the tools and their trade offs you should be able to use the right tools for the job which won’t hinder you in the future. Of course if all you know is JavaScript, then that requires going a bit outside your comfort zone.