[bquinlan]

Google App Engine originally used a custom containment strategy.

Back in the day, I was on the team that added Python 2.7 support to App Engine and we were experimenting with a different containment approach.

But Python is a complex language to support - you need to support WSGI, to support dynamic loading (for C extensions), a reasonably performant file system (Python calls `stat` about a billion times before actually importing a file), etc.

So our original runtime was actually Brainf#ck. So, at once point, if you had guessed that Google supported it, you could have written your (simple) webapp in Brainf#ck and Google would have scaled it up to hundreds of machines if needed ;-)

[thequux]

Aw darn! Around that time, I was at Google, and there was a thread on eng-misc (or possibly eng-misc-mtv; it's been lost to the sands of time) with people contributing programs that would flip a virtual coin 50 times and output the sequence of heads and tails. I contributed one in BF because I had some spare time waiting for a deploy job, and I've been joking since that I've "written BF code professionally".

And now you tell me that that could have been for real. :-(

[crazypython]

What?

[apeace]

I was also really confused by this comment until I re-read it later.

At first I thought OP meant “we wrote out container runtime in Brainfuck,” but what I think they meant was “we first deployed Brainfuck support in order to test our new runtime on something simpler than Python.”

[vangelis]

Why though?