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A peek into tech stacks of web giants

 
Bartender
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This is not a question, just some interesting information for the curious types

Most of the web giants rarely come out with what their tech stacks look like. But now and then, somebody who worked or works there lets out some interesting info.
One such comment came up in another discussion forum yesterday from an ex-Googler.
I was a bit surprised - in a good way - to see that some popular google services are purportedly written in Java:


Facebook's backend is, to my knowledge, largely C++, connected via Thrift.
The frontend started out as PHP, eventually got compiled to C++ via HipHop, replaced HipHop with HHVM, and then added support for Hack.
My understanding is that they're gradually adding more React to it as well. FB also includes a number of specialized services, eg. Chat & Whatsapp are written in Erlang.

Google as written by Larry Page was done in Java.
It was rewritten in Python by Scott Hassan before the company was incorporated. As of 1999, the webserver and crawler were still in Python.
It was almost completely rewritten (multiple times) in C++ shortly thereafter for efficiency.

Most of the Google Apps (GMail, Docs, Plus, etc.) are written in Java.
The webserver for Search shifted over to a combination of Java and two different DSLs in 2010; I worked on the implementation of this.
My comment is lightly paraphrased from a remark Larry Page gave when asked why Google doesn't adopt more modern programming
frameworks like Rails or Node (it was in 2011, when both of these were still state-of-the-art).



Here's the complete thread.
 
Bartender
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Thanks for sharing that info. Here's a cow
 
Karthik Shiraly
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Hey Salvin! Thanks for the bovine gift
 
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Very interesting, thanks for sharing. O once used HipHop/HHVM in the early days when they released it for public, but it didn't work for my bigger projects, sadly. The documentation, at least during the time I was playing with it, was barely available. Just a few words written here and there.

Maybe it's not web giant, but Nasa utilizes Java as well. Here is a link to an interview with four NASA engineers who talk about Java at NASA: https://jaxenter.com/netbeans/developing-nasas-mission-software-with-java

Now a little offtopic, but it's still something interesting I believe. In 1994 NASA released a paper "C Style Guide" that describes style guide for software written in C at NASA. Very interesting read: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dts/pm/Papers/nasa-c-style.pdf
 
Karthik Shiraly
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Good to see so much enthusiasm for JavaFX and Netbeans RIA from NASA. Those UI screenshots look very cool!
 
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I'm under the impression that Amazon.com was based on WebLogic. Back before Oracle bought BEA.
 
Police line, do not cross. Well, this tiny ad can go through:
a bit of art, as a gift, the permaculture playing cards
https://gardener-gift.com
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