News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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 RNCTX on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @04:22AM (#28997762)
No, but there are signs of distress, IMO. I think their decline in usage has resulted in a decline in port maintainers, which is a bigger deal now that systemd is the default on Linux for so many things.

In the 32 bit days it wasn’t hard to get most Linux binaries to run, now it’s virtually impossible for an end user to do on their own.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by trasz on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:26PM (#29004231)
Pretty much nothing important depends on systemd, for the simple reason that it’s proprietary and non-portable. Thus, even if there is some code that depends on it, it’s optional.

Also, Linux binary compatibility - the capability to run unmodified Linux binaries - works much better now than ever before.

[ Parent | on HN ]