Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing

Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by mk89 on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @03:50PM (#46050620)

No but whatsapp was built by 2 guys that had previously worked at Yahoo, and they picked a very strong tech for the backend: erlang.

So while they probably didn't bother scaling the service to millions in the first version, they 1) knew what it would take, 2) chose already from the ground up a good technology to have a smoother transition to your "X millions users". The step "X millions to XYZ millions and then billions" required other things too.

At least they didn't have to write a php-to-C++ compiler for Php like Facebook had, given the initial design choice of Mark Zuckeberg, which shows exactly what it means to begin something already with the right tool and ideas in mind.

But this takes skills.

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by Jtsummers on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @04:11PM (#46050833)

> No but whatsapp was built by 2 guys that had previously worked at Yahoo, and they picked a very strong tech for the backend: erlang.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44911553

Started as PHP, not as Erlang.

> 1) knew what it would take, 2) chose already from the ground up a good technology to have a smoother transition to your "X millions users".

No, as above, that was a pivot. They did not start from the ground up with Erlang or ejabberd, they adopted that later.

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by mk89 on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @05:26PM (#46051566)

Thanks, somehow I remembered wrong.

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by nradov on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @04:03PM (#46050743)

Did they succeed because of Erlang or in spite of Erlang? We can't draw any reliable conclusions from a single data point. Maybe a different platform would have worked even better?

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by awesome_dude on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @04:37PM (#46051105)

Yeah - the technology used is a seperate concern to their abilities as users (developers) of that technology and the effectiveness at handling the scale.

I, for example, have always said that I am more than capable of writing code in C that is several orders of magnitude SLOWER than what I could write in.. say Python.

My skillset would never be used as an example of the value of C for whatever

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by HalcyonicStorm on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @08:46PM (#46053223)

Erlang is uniquely suited to chat systems out of the box in a way that most other ecosystems aren't. Lightweight green threads via the BEAM vm, process scheduler so concurrent out of the box, immutable data structures, message passing as communication between processes.

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by nradov on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @10:44AM (#46058530)

There's nothing unique about Erlang. I have nothing against it but other companies have built messaging systems using other platforms that work as well or better than WhatsApp.

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by aiisjustanif on Thursday November 27, 2025 @12:31AM (#46066015)

Examples please.

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by nradov on Thursday November 27, 2025 @12:30PM (#46071401)

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by ValdikSS on Friday November 28, 2025 @09:02AM (#46078725)

They took already existing protocol (XMPP) and already existing implementation in Erlang (ejabberd)—there weren't many alternatives at the time really.

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