With what programming language was Facebook written??

11 replies
Hi,
I was just wondering if anyone knows what programming language was used by Mark Zuckerberg to write facebook.com?

Thanks
WE
#facebook #language #programming #written
  • Profile picture of the author IceTeam
    At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with Memcache.
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  • Profile picture of the author KyleGolemMedia
    A lot of PHP, too.
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  • Profile picture of the author wrongnumber
    hi,

    initially zuckerberg wrote it in php, backend was a lamp stack, later as the needs grew, the servers had to be incorporated with a cdn (akamai) and hashcache servers were introduced, later memcache came into being which is a opensource project written by Facebook engineers themselves.

    Since they use off the shelf hard drives and systems, more of the coding is custom. To introduce new features C++ was introduced some time ago, at the backend aswell as the front end (which is ofcourse visible in the source code of the webpage written as ...CDATA...)

    Currently their servers serve 5,00,000 photos a second, and add more than 24tb of just the picture data every week, so... they have to be pretty cautious about space.

    Hope that helps, you can search more about them at their developer blog and wikipedia.

    Thanks
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    • Profile picture of the author st8ic
      Originally Posted by wrongnumber View Post

      hi,
      To introduce new features C++ was introduced some time ago, at the backend aswell as the front end (which is ofcourse visible in the source code of the webpage written as ...CDATA...)
      Not what that means.
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      • Profile picture of the author PhaedraDragon
        So what was the original language used to build Facebook? Was it Pascal? Was it Cobal? Was it Fortran? Was it Binary? Was it Machine Language? Was it C? Was it C+? Even PHP has to be written in some form of language.
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        • Profile picture of the author PhaedraDragon
          For that matter, I could ask what Base Number system was also used?
          Binary - Trinary - Quad - Quint - Hex - Octal - Hexidecimal?
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  • Profile picture of the author Jason Z
    Interesting, I didn't realize that it was originally done in PHP. That's some serious data pumping through their servers these days. Pretty amazing.
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    • Profile picture of the author mojojuju
      Don't forget that they use HipHop to convert their PHP to optimized C++ which is then compiled to a binary.
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      :)

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  • Profile picture of the author webexperts666
    Thanks for all the reply's.
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  • Profile picture of the author aeroturner
    Really a good question..its hard to find what programming language is being used by fb team..I think so ful n full PHP plays with them..what u guys thing abt python ??
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    • Profile picture of the author webexperts666
      Originally Posted by aeroturner View Post

      Really a good question..its hard to find what programming language is being used by fb team..I think so ful n full PHP plays with them..what u guys thing abt python ??
      Thanks I dont think python is used on that.
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