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Whatsapp had 35 engineers and 450 million users when they sold to Facebook for $21.8 billion. Whatsapp, of course, was developed in Erlang. There are times wh

Whatsapp had 35 engineers and 450 million users when they sold to Facebook for $21.8 billion. Whatsapp, of course, was developed in Erlang. There are times when the masses are just wrong. The Whatsapp story probably isn't possible with some other technology stack. Of course, maybe it's just that very few applications need to scale in the way Erlang enables.

Jagerbizzle 3y ago
Ironically I think the original Facebook messaging did something similar, but they changed tech due to their inability to hire developers competent in the language.
- bmitc 3y ago
  So they hired "smart" people who couldn't learn Erlang, an easy language to learn?
- ramchip 3y ago
  I don't think hiring was the issue. See these Quora posts: https://qr.ae/ps8h6J https://qr.ae/ps8h6J
yen223 3y ago
Discord was (still is?) built on Elixir, which was a descendant of Erlang. It seems Erlang is comfortable in the niche of "real-time messaging platforms"
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gregors 3y ago
  They've had some recent-ish blog posts about it https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-with-a-million-plus-online-users-in-a-single-server https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...
lIIllIIllIIllII 3y ago
In my experience, lots of stuff needs to scale massively, but (outside of the better tech companies I guess?) mainstream tools/stacks/approaches are hangovers from n-tier arch days and not really right for it, so the majority of distributed systems are tyre fires.