[oconnor663]

I think Facebook chat had a very similar experience. The first version was written by someone who liked Erlang. Later on, when some performance issues came up (probably related to GC), no one knew Erlang, and all the high performance backend code in the company was in C++. So it made sense to rewrite the thing.

[trab]

Then they acquired whatsapp that was written in Erlang.

[ludwigvan]

And I think I had read that Whatsapp used Erlang because Facebook Chat was using Erlang and they thought Facebook knew what they were doing and decided to use the same tech. What a twist

[reducesuffering]

Where did you read that? I believe Whatsapp used erlang because they leveraged ejabberd [0] for XMPP. Wouldn't surprise me if this is why FB originally used Erlang for the chat servers too. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejabberd

[darkr]

Yep. Facebook chat was originally based on ejabberd.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20121224094022/http://cufp.galoi...

[fineoldcannibal]

I believe it was because of the Beluga acquisition which was in Erlang