I’ve played with the API a little bit... it’s a brilliant little web socket protocol. Whoever designed it was not pressured to get an MVP product out as fast as humanly possible, or has insane experience with real-time distributed protocols, or both. Discord works through arbitrary NATs and your connections persist across client updates and even device reboots. Sometimes this yields weird behavior but I find it technically reassuring more than anything. I’m pretty sure they use Erlang (Elixir) which is infamous as the language that Facebook couldn’t wrangle. I’d love to read more about their stack.
Re:Discord now has a store
by steveklabnik on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:17PM
(#18245645)
They do use a lot of Elixir; they’ve written about it in the past.
That’s what I’ve read too: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
Re:Discord now has a store
by sergiotapia on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @11:29PM
(#18245691)
Do you have more info on how Facebook tried to use Elixir but couldn't?
I heard about it second hand from an engineering manager who knew some people there. Would love more info too. Context was an argument about introducing Kotlin on an Android team which, well, is no longer arguable (=
Edit: I found this: https://elixirforum.com/t/why-did-facebook-leave-erlang/2231, and this: https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-stabi....
For reasons that I struggle to put my finger on.. Discord beats out all of the Enterprise chat apps for chat. Most of the groups I am in (that are non gaming related) now use Discord for their chats.
The client support across iOS, Linux, Windows & Mac is fantastic and consistent. And the mobile notifications are super smart - if your desktop is not idle they go there, if you haven't read them yet once you've been idle or lock your screen they are now sent to your phone - including any you haven't yet read. It's great.