15 ms·

What a great tool. Facebook are absolutely killing with the last year or so with all of their open source contributions and releases. First HHVM, Haxl, React.js

What a great tool. Facebook are absolutely killing with the last year or so with all of their open source contributions and releases. First HHVM, Haxl, React.js (amongst other things) and now Flow, this is fantastic. I am really liking how companies like Facebook & Google are concentrating their efforts on the web language of the future: Javascript. The support for JSX alone is a MASSIVE feature (expected given React.js and JSX). Good job Facebook.

inglor 12y ago
It's hard for me to give appreciation but while Google have traditionally been tech leaders in web technologies: Facebook are doing really awesome stuff lately. It's not just React and this - it's also FLUX, HHVM, Hack, Haxl (Their Haskell libraries), contributing to writing a spec for PHP and other ventures. I'm interested in who is the driving force behind this open source change in Facebook, I don't recall facebook in behaving these way 4 years ago. Can anyone find anything on a policy change that happened? They really turned around.
- kmavm 12y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. For context, I'm an HHVM alum who has been at Facebook for almost six years now (wow time flies). From my point of view, most of what has changed is resources and the immediacy of our survival-level concerns. Four years ago Google had declared nuclear war on us, we had far fewer users, we were not profitable, there were constant fires to put out with basic production operations stuff we've gotten better at, and we were enormously more under-staffed. I was working on HHVM already, but it was in a million little pieces spread across Drew's, Jason's, and my desks. The tools we're open sourcing over the last two years mostly did not yet exist, and if they existed, it was in some primordial form. We also have gotten much, much better imho at being good stewards of our open source projects; HHVM's predecessor system, the HipHop compiler, was also open source, but we people were spread way too thin to be able to respond to bug reports, pull requests, get FB's latest code into public hands, build binary packages for popular distros, etc. on a timely basis. Huge props are due to all of the technical people on our open source teams.
  - inglor 12y ago
    Thanks for answering, it's always good to get answers straight from the source. It would be awesome if you blogged about this. It would be interesting to read _how_ you got better at being good stewards of your open source projects and what made you open source these. I think it's a challenge a lot of people face.
    - jamesgpearce 12y ago
      This presentation at OSCON 2014 runs through some of the things we've tightened up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk
  - girvo 12y ago
    Thank you, so very very much, for HHVM. Between HHVM, Hack, and now Flow, I can write software using the languages I use most often but gain the benefits of better tooling.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Their "cold storage" system for using optical media to store data long term seemed interesting.
- nbm 12y ago
  As kmavm said, thanks for saying so on behalf of the people who have been working on open sourcing things (I haven't as yet). I don't think there's been any policy changes. I think the policy has always been that we're open to open sourcing stuff, so long as it is useful to others (ie, not just a code drop that nobody can use) and someone signs up for the work and there isn't something important that's being dropped in the process. The difference I think is people, energy, and momentum. We've been able to find people (many already at the company) genuinely interested in some of the less glamorous parts of building a scalable program to open source things - things like sync processes and pull request management and UIs for ACLs and CLAs and so forth. We've had people who, often due to the availability of these tools, have developed an internal energy to want to put in the extra effort to make their project ready to be open sourced (like making sure all dependencies are available already, or scoping out or stubbing out things that are Facebook-specific (our asset management flow, for example) while still keeping the software useful, and so forth. The momentum has also made the idea of open sourcing code more top-of-mind to people, which helps to get people to rewrite their changes to accommodate a nascent open sourcing effort on a piece of code, or to get more discretionary time to investigate or work on making something open source. Or even just moral support from your team and colleagues.
  - eric_bullington 12y ago
    Well, regardless of root cause, you all are racking up some amazing open source accomplishments. Big props to everyone working on open source at Facebook. And I think these efforts will pay off in spades for Facebook, in terms of attracting top talent and in terms of the expertise that results from having the some of the best dev tools available being developed in-house.
- azakai 12y ago
  > I'm interested in who is the driving force behind this open source change in Facebook, I don't recall facebook in behaving these way 4 years ago. [..] Can anyone find anything on a policy change that happened? They really turned around. My guess is that Facebook was just much smaller 4 years ago, over that period its staff grew very quickly. And even today it has an order of magnitude less employees than say Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Larger, more established companies have more opportunity to open source things on this scale.
- glifchits 12y ago
  Facebook has been doing a great job with marketing their open source projects. It seems like every Facebook OSS project has a strong logo, beautiful landing page with good documentation, a distinct group of project champions within the company (with embedded recordings of their conference talks on the project site), mailing lists, IRC channels, and the projects are often exceedingly applicable to a large proportion of real world software projects. Not to say that Google's OSS hasn't done much of the same, but AFAIK many of their projects fail on at least a couple of these points.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kulkarnic 12y ago
Is this a serious post, or are you being sarcastic? I honestly can't tell. JS the language of the future? Why? It has probably the worst gotchas of any language I've coded in, it's verbose, and weird scoping. Nor is it especially nice to optimize for/with. I can certainly see being stuck with Javascript (just like we're stuck with the x86 instruction set even if simpler alternatives exist), but I'm not sure it's something I rejoice about. Javascript is like anti-Batman: a language we all deserve, but not one we need.
- cdelsolar 12y ago
  Read the Good Parts of Javascript and get a JS linter. Javascript is a fine language if you do this.
  - Shizka 12y ago
    I've had the exact same concerns as the person you replied to. I just want to make sure since the title differs from the one you stated. Is this the book you were talking about: http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockford/dp/0596517742 http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor... And how/why did the book improve your opinion about the language?
    - callum85 12y ago
      It's an opinionated book that sets out a subset of JavaScript that you should use, avoiding all the 'bad parts'. This subset is what tools like JSLint and JSHint were designed to promote - they flag you up if you use a bad part. It's a seminal work. These days I find some of its rules a little dogmatic (for instance I like the 'new' keyword now), but I'm glad I went through a phase of sticking to it relgiously for a while. It taught me to stop bitching about the weird parts, just avoid them instead. And when you do this, you end up loving the language and making cool shit with it. Which is a good situation to be in, because it's the most widely distributed runtime in the world.
      - Havvy 12y ago
dreamweapon 12y ago
I am really liking how companies like Facebook & Google are concentrating their efforts on the web language of the future: Javascript. "...on the web language of the past, which we are unfortunately stuck with for the foreseeable future: JavaScript" might have been a better summation of the current (rather dismal) state of affairs with regard to web scripting.
rdtsc 12y ago
rocksdb too

inglor 12y ago

It's hard for me to give appreciation but while Google have traditionally been tech leaders in web technologies: Facebook are doing really awesome stuff lately. It's not just React and this - it's also FLUX, HHVM, Hack, Haxl (Their Haskell libraries), contributing to writing a spec for PHP and other ventures. I'm interested in who is the driving force behind this open source change in Facebook, I don't recall facebook in behaving these way 4 years ago. Can anyone find anything on a policy change that happened? They really turned around.

kmavm 12y ago
Thanks for the kind words. For context, I'm an HHVM alum who has been at Facebook for almost six years now (wow time flies). From my point of view, most of what has changed is resources and the immediacy of our survival-level concerns. Four years ago Google had declared nuclear war on us, we had far fewer users, we were not profitable, there were constant fires to put out with basic production operations stuff we've gotten better at, and we were enormously more under-staffed. I was working on HHVM already, but it was in a million little pieces spread across Drew's, Jason's, and my desks. The tools we're open sourcing over the last two years mostly did not yet exist, and if they existed, it was in some primordial form. We also have gotten much, much better imho at being good stewards of our open source projects; HHVM's predecessor system, the HipHop compiler, was also open source, but we people were spread way too thin to be able to respond to bug reports, pull requests, get FB's latest code into public hands, build binary packages for popular distros, etc. on a timely basis. Huge props are due to all of the technical people on our open source teams.
- inglor 12y ago
  Thanks for answering, it's always good to get answers straight from the source. It would be awesome if you blogged about this. It would be interesting to read _how_ you got better at being good stewards of your open source projects and what made you open source these. I think it's a challenge a lot of people face.
  - jamesgpearce 12y ago
    This presentation at OSCON 2014 runs through some of the things we've tightened up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk
- girvo 12y ago
  Thank you, so very very much, for HHVM. Between HHVM, Hack, and now Flow, I can write software using the languages I use most often but gain the benefits of better tooling.
digi_owl 12y ago
Their "cold storage" system for using optical media to store data long term seemed interesting.
nbm 12y ago
As kmavm said, thanks for saying so on behalf of the people who have been working on open sourcing things (I haven't as yet). I don't think there's been any policy changes. I think the policy has always been that we're open to open sourcing stuff, so long as it is useful to others (ie, not just a code drop that nobody can use) and someone signs up for the work and there isn't something important that's being dropped in the process. The difference I think is people, energy, and momentum. We've been able to find people (many already at the company) genuinely interested in some of the less glamorous parts of building a scalable program to open source things - things like sync processes and pull request management and UIs for ACLs and CLAs and so forth. We've had people who, often due to the availability of these tools, have developed an internal energy to want to put in the extra effort to make their project ready to be open sourced (like making sure all dependencies are available already, or scoping out or stubbing out things that are Facebook-specific (our asset management flow, for example) while still keeping the software useful, and so forth. The momentum has also made the idea of open sourcing code more top-of-mind to people, which helps to get people to rewrite their changes to accommodate a nascent open sourcing effort on a piece of code, or to get more discretionary time to investigate or work on making something open source. Or even just moral support from your team and colleagues.
- eric_bullington 12y ago
  Well, regardless of root cause, you all are racking up some amazing open source accomplishments. Big props to everyone working on open source at Facebook. And I think these efforts will pay off in spades for Facebook, in terms of attracting top talent and in terms of the expertise that results from having the some of the best dev tools available being developed in-house.
azakai 12y ago
> I'm interested in who is the driving force behind this open source change in Facebook, I don't recall facebook in behaving these way 4 years ago. [..] Can anyone find anything on a policy change that happened? They really turned around. My guess is that Facebook was just much smaller 4 years ago, over that period its staff grew very quickly. And even today it has an order of magnitude less employees than say Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Larger, more established companies have more opportunity to open source things on this scale.
glifchits 12y ago
Facebook has been doing a great job with marketing their open source projects. It seems like every Facebook OSS project has a strong logo, beautiful landing page with good documentation, a distinct group of project champions within the company (with embedded recordings of their conference talks on the project site), mailing lists, IRC channels, and the projects are often exceedingly applicable to a large proportion of real world software projects. Not to say that Google's OSS hasn't done much of the same, but AFAIK many of their projects fail on at least a couple of these points.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kulkarnic 12y ago

Is this a serious post, or are you being sarcastic? I honestly can't tell. JS the language of the future? Why? It has probably the worst gotchas of any language I've coded in, it's verbose, and weird scoping. Nor is it especially nice to optimize for/with. I can certainly see being stuck with Javascript (just like we're stuck with the x86 instruction set even if simpler alternatives exist), but I'm not sure it's something I rejoice about. Javascript is like anti-Batman: a language we all deserve, but not one we need.

cdelsolar 12y ago
Read the Good Parts of Javascript and get a JS linter. Javascript is a fine language if you do this.
- Shizka 12y ago
  I've had the exact same concerns as the person you replied to. I just want to make sure since the title differs from the one you stated. Is this the book you were talking about: http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockford/dp/0596517742 http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor... And how/why did the book improve your opinion about the language?
  - callum85 12y ago
    It's an opinionated book that sets out a subset of JavaScript that you should use, avoiding all the 'bad parts'. This subset is what tools like JSLint and JSHint were designed to promote - they flag you up if you use a bad part. It's a seminal work. These days I find some of its rules a little dogmatic (for instance I like the 'new' keyword now), but I'm glad I went through a phase of sticking to it relgiously for a while. It taught me to stop bitching about the weird parts, just avoid them instead. And when you do this, you end up loving the language and making cool shit with it. Which is a good situation to be in, because it's the most widely distributed runtime in the world.
    - Havvy 12y ago

dreamweapon 12y ago

I am really liking how companies like Facebook & Google are concentrating their efforts on the web language of the future: Javascript. "...on the web language of the past, which we are unfortunately stuck with for the foreseeable future: JavaScript" might have been a better summation of the current (rather dismal) state of affairs with regard to web scripting.

rdtsc 12y ago

rocksdb too