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A comment on WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers. Parent comment

Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by capableweb on Monday October 25, 2021 @07:01AM (#28986402)
Seems redundant to have a Express backend + REST API, why can't you just build your REST API on the Express backend?

And also, React is complex, hardly anyone seems to know the internals. The API interface might be easy to learn, but "simple" is not something that you should label React with.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by crate_barre on Monday October 25, 2021 @07:42AM (#28986689)
why can't you just build your REST API on the Express backend

Pretty sure he means to set up the REST api in Express with a few simple routes.

JS is not complex, and pretty vanilla choice. It’s what people add on top of it that gives it a bad name. I’ll link to this guy so you can understand:

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/how-i-built-a-modern-website-in-...

^ This is the problem, not JavaScript.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by Zababa on Monday October 25, 2021 @08:48AM (#28987161)
I'm not sure I understand why people build websites like that. My theory would be that usually at some point you have to go lower in the stack (learn how Linux/Node/V8 work or stuff like that). You can avoid going lower in the stack, but the complexity has to go somewhere, and that's what we see here.
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