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Ask HN: Any Facebook engineer here I have a question:)

1 points| jerawaj740 | 4 months ago

was building facebook with PHP considered a mistake ? (no hate for php it is just a question)

2 comments

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linguae|4 months ago

Disclaimer: I spent a year at Facebook as a production engineer.

I wonder if you're familiar with the Hack programming language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language)), which was developed by Facebook as an extension of PHP that addresses some of the issues that Facebook had with PHP as the company scaled from its beginnings as a social network for college students to a colossal network.

I personally believe implementing a multi-billion dollar enterprise on the foundation of PHP code isn't a mistake. Even if there's a lot of tech debt, there's a ton of money to pay off that debt, and then some. Most of us dream of having that type of problem.

jerawaj740|4 months ago

If Facebook were built today, what would be the primary language used for the backend?