[Dobbs]

There are actually two (or more) different services. One that sits and talks to the users via TCP and maintains the IRC connection state and then makes back end calls to the bit that makes decisions and publishes information.

This allows us to almost never deploy changes to the first service, while frequently making changes to the second system. Of course when you do want to make changes to the first you have to reestablish all the TCP connections again, but if you engineer it correctly you can do it infrequently enough to be worthwhile.

Disclaimer: I don't actually work on the chat team, this is based upon various conversations with people on the chat team and may be incorrect in some specifics or out of date.

[dayjah]

Yes, Dobbs captures this here. To be clear, the first re-write of the chat service was from twisted python into tornado python. In that re-write we produced a number of services which implemented the biz logic. One of those services was a TCP terminating edge server which has very little logic in it beside how to call the biz logic and send messages to connected clients. Once this was all written we converted to Go incrementally.