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Are you talking about WhatsApp? Discord?

• toast0 3y ago
  I can't speak for Discord, but at WhatsApp, we chose Erlang for a very good reason: ejabberd is a very clear base to start with if you want to run a chat server, and ejabberd runs on Erlang. At least Facebook, WhatsApp, Riot Games, and Discord have done it, and I think there's plenty more. While I was there, I was the third most Erlang knowledgeable server hire, because I rememebered Ericsson open sourcing it decades ago, but hadn't used it before. We hired two people I can recall who were experienced with Erlang (well, and a client developer who used Erlang in school but didn't use it for WhatsApp). This wasn't a big deal, Erlang is a small language, and smart developers pick up enough to be useful pretty quickly. There's a learning curve for distributed systems challenges, but IMHO, message passing concurrency makes a lot of things a lot simpler than shared memory concurrency, and you can get a lot of good work done where the new person does the bulk of the work and a mentor helps with distributed systems bits. Anyway, Facebook chat decided to abandon Erlang for hiring reasons, and transitioned to a C++ server, and I don't think it was that hard; Erlang wasn't some boat anchor holding them back when they decided to switch, like the GP suggested. Even if it was, that's kind of an amusing complaint: this thing is so awful, and we can't even replace it because ??? it's too good?
  • Capricorn2481 3y ago
    > Even if it was, that's kind of an amusing complaint: this thing is so awful, and we can't even replace it because ??? it's too good? Obviously they were suggesting that rewrites/changing your tech stack for a project is expensive and not everyone has the luxury to do it. Facebook does.