Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by harigov 2925 days ago
Working at large companies like these, it is clear that many of their own applications never use these technologies. Why then is FB investing into such technology? Where do they plan to use it?
3 comments

The article says BOLT was deployed in production with HHVM (which is Facebook's PHP runtime).
The main example they gave in this article, HHVM, is what all of Facebook's backend runs on, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
I work on Facebook infra, and to me that's all the front end.
Many might not be all, in many places this stuff wouldn’t move the needle but might be crucial somewhere else also the expertise to do these things doesn’t evaporate after they are done.

The bigger problem I have with a lot of the stuff the Facebooks of the world put out is that most of us simply don’t need it now and maybe never.

I hear too much “but big company Foo uses it!” well yeah but Foo can hire the creator and half a dozen engineers to maintain it, you have two developers.

Pick boring unless you can’t is my approach.

> Pick boring unless you can’t is my approach.

But when you can't, being able to learn from the lessons of giant companies via their open source software sure is a blessing!