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>Like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger had used Erlang and ejabberd but moved away from it after finding it difficult to recruit engineers. Since WhatsApp handled
by DeathArrow 3y ago
>Like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger had used Erlang and ejabberd but moved away from it after finding it difficult to recruit engineers.
Since WhatsApp handled much more users with just 35 engineers, I would have thought it wouldn't be so much of a deal to recruit some Erlang engineers. They didn't need to recruit thousands of engineers.
What platform have Facebook moved Messenger to?
- toast0 3y agoFacebook Messenger moved to a C++ server, built like the rest of Facebook C++ servers. The story I heard was they were looking for people who already knew Erlang and were having trouble finding them, so they rewrote the thing in a language that they could hire for. From my recollection, when I was at WhatsApp, we only hired two server engineers who had used Erlang before. I was considered knowledgable about Erlang, because I vaguely remembered seeing the Slashdot post when Ericsson open sourced it. Pretty much we hired smart people and gave them an Erlang book. As a result, I don't think we did OTP applications properly, and we might have missed out on a couple other things, and our code might not be very idiomatic always, but I think we did ok. But, beyond hiring, Erlang is a weird fit inside Facebook's datacenter infrastructure. The Messenger server team was (and I believe still is) very small, and rewriting into something with less impedence mismatch for a small team to deal with probably made sense. For WhatsApp, we spent quite a lot of effort making our software fit at Facebook, and we had to give up FreeBSD and from what I've heard, hotloading, too.