What was facebook written in

In other words, if you think what you're asking for a zip code, you can make sure you're getting numbers instead of words, and if you want a property photo, that you get an image file instead of text.

Facebook didn't set out to create a common language for other companies to use, explains GraphQL co-creator and former Facebook engineer Lee Byron. GraphQL's origins date to , Byron says, "when Facebook started taking mobile really seriously. Facebook didn't release GraphQL to the public until But as he and other GraphQL developers talked to colleagues elsewhere, they realized that others faced the same problems, and had tried similar solutions.

As often happens with open source software , a company has emerged to offer commercial support for GraphQL. Apollo, which spun out of a startup called Meteor in , makes a product designed to make it easier for developers to build and maintain services that support GraphQL, along with features designed to boost performance.

Last month Facebook announced that it would establish an independent organization under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation to own and manage GraphQL. Byron credits the decision to the growing number of people, himself included, outside of Facebook involved in not just using GraphQL but in developing it as well.

By establishing an independent organization that owns the project, all the players in the GraphQL ecosystem can make sure that they can talk to with each other. Klint Finley is a contributing writer for WIRED covering tech policy, software development, cloud computing, and more. Contributor Twitter. HHVM was a new foundation for the Facebook website, letting the company run its site on significantly fewer machines.

Now, with Hack, their new programming language, Bryan O'Sullivan and his tiny team have solved the other problem. Hack makes it easier to manage code and eliminate errors. It made it harder for them to easily apprehend the consequences of some of the work they were doing. You can think of Hack as a new version of PHP. It too runs on the Hip Hop Virtual Machine, but it lets coders use both dynamic typing and static typing.

This is what's called gradual typing , and until now, it has mostly been an academic exercise. Facebook, O'Sullivan says, is the first to bring gradual typing to a "real, industrial strength" language.

What this means is that Facebook was able to gradually replace its existing PHP code with Hack -- move from the old dynamically typed system to a statically typed arrangement. In doing so, he explains, Facebook built much more precise code -- code with fewer flaws. Hack provides a kind of safety net for developers. What's more, engineers can more easily understand code when they revisit it. Static typing acts a lot like documentation.

But the big trick is that Hack provides these benefits without slowing down the developer: Unlike other statically type languages, Hack can run without compiling.

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