[habibur]

Search for the memo where google employees were saying, "we the developers of google are losing to Youtube, as Youtube engineers use Python and we use Java. And iteration in Java is slower than Python." That's before google purchased youtube.

Edit : Python. The point remains the same.

Link : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16674628

[StevePerkins]

YouTube was based on Python from the very beginning. And since then has migrated more and more pieces to Golang. PHP was never a major component of their stack, if it was ever used at all.

Search for the memo where Twitter migrated to the JVM. That one actually did happen.

[mike_hearn]

The link from your linked page states that Google were using C++, not Java. Which is correct. I was there. Writing web servers in C++ is a good idea if your web server is 1% HTML rendering/UI and 99% complex algorithms over large binary data structures i.e. a search engine. It's not so great if your web server is 95% UI.

[habibur]

Found the memo, reads Java.

Link :

The source :

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1433837480449613839/ph...

Discussed on HN, 2021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28424339

[mike_hearn]

Are you reading these links carefully enough? The first link you posted was talking about Google's use of C++, but you presented it as an argument against Java and in favour of PHP (which YouTube weren't using). This second source also doesn't say Java vs Python was the problem. They say:

"We're constrained on UI/Java development resources", "we have 1.5 engineers working on UI things and that is slowing us down" and "I think if we had one more good Java/UI engineer we'd be kicking butt vs YouTube".

So the problem was a lack of people ("resources") assigned to the UI side, i.e. too much of their headcount is being consumed by the C++ infrastructure leaving very little time for UI-centric work like social features. Google Video's problem is stated here to be too little Java development, not too much.

As someone who was there at the time and who read the internal post-mortem written by the Video team, Google Video vs YouTube wasn't primarily about implementation language. It was pretty much as the emails you cite say:

"They're cranking interesting features a lot faster than we are, but don't likely have a backend that will scale or a plan to make money. We, otoh, have these"

The YouTube guys did the now classic VC play of focusing on growth hacking without any idea of how to pay for it all beyond being acquired. At the time Google bought them the site was close to total collapse; the project to stop it running out of bandwidth was literally called BandAid. The Google Video team was also small but focused more on stable and scalable infrastructure, and product-wise they'd been chasing professional content as they couldn't see any obvious path to monetizing hobbyist produced video. In turn that pushed them away from the Flash plugin towards a more HD video oriented custom plugin, which hurt adoption. These were the wrong calls clearly, but, YouTube didn't really have a plan either. In the end both sides needed each other. One of the first things that was done after the acquisition was start moving core YT functions like video and thumbnail serving off Python and onto the Google C++/Java infrastructure. The web server UI on the other hand remained in Python for a long time so their (social) feature throughput wouldn't be disrupted. I think that codebase did eventually stop scaling and got rewritten, but my memory starts to fail there and I can't quite recall what the state was back when I left.

[habibur]

Youtube was first written in PHP.

> Before Google acquired Youtube, the majority of the code was initially written in PHP, but there were many restrictions and clutters in PHP at the time, so after acquiring Youtube by Google, they moved to Python as one of the core parts of its backend programming.

Python started after google's acquisition. It's not that youtube was "never written in PHP".

https://ourtechroom.com/tech/technologies-programming-langua...

[twblalock]

Rate of iteration changes with the size of the codebase, and not in PHP's favor...

[UncleMeat]

And yet, YouTube rewrote their stack in C++.