News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by mej10 on Thursday November 22, 2012 @09:27AM (#4818833)
Does this mean that Facebook is using Haskell more these days?
Re:Leaving Microsoft by davidw on Thursday November 22, 2012 @10:23AM (#4819004)
Nah, it means that Simon Marlow harbored a latent desire to go code in PHP.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by ygra on Friday November 23, 2012 @03:32AM (#4821373)
Facebook is about equally PHP and C++ these days.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by amackera on Friday November 23, 2012 @11:58AM (#4822814)
This really boggles my mind. Facebook's stack is intriguing.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by NullSet on Thursday November 22, 2012 @10:43AM (#4819059)
I think they might be. Bryan O'Sullivan has been working for them for some time now.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by pufuwozu on Thursday November 22, 2012 @01:10PM (#4819536)
From what I can tell, Bryan mostly works in Python and C at Facebook.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by dochtman on Thursday November 22, 2012 @01:33PM (#4819609)
He recently gave a Haskell course there, I think. Bob Ippolito was talking about that.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by pionar on Thursday November 22, 2012 @10:31AM (#4819027)
Or that they will be, or that FB wants to create its own language ala Google.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by chriseidhof on Thursday November 22, 2012 @12:01PM (#4819335)
They've been doing that for a while. One of the major projects was/is HipHop, a PHP to C++ compiler.
Re:Leaving Microsoft by kmavm on Thursday November 22, 2012 @12:27PM (#4819413)
Hey, I'm an engineer on the HipHop team, and a minor-league Haskell enthusiast. A couple clarifications:

1. HipHop is itself written in C++. While this did not logically need to be the case, it is the case.

2. These days our JIT compiler, the HipHop VM (hhvm) is out-performing the PHP-to-C++ ahead-of-time compiler. HHVM is under the HipHop umbrella, and so is also written in C++. If you're vaguely aware that Facebook has some sort of high-performance PHP execution engine, but have avoided investigation because compiling PHP sounds like a drag, check hhvm out; it is fast, and you use it the same way you use a PHP interpreter.

3. HipHop is not our entire PHP stack, however, and functional languages have a significant beachhead in static analysis. pfff (https://github.com/facebook/pfff) is a sophisticated multi-language analysis and transformation framework written in OCaml. We use it for many, many purposes; e.g., at code review submission time, pfff symbolically executes the changed code to look for various dangerous idioms and highlight them as areas for the reviewer to focus attention.

4. There are other projects written in Haskell that, alas, we're not ready to talk intelligently about publicly. Watch this space, however.

Overall, FP has a sizable presence at Facebook. Haskell's presence is a bit smaller than OCaml, though that might be changing. Facebook is definitely "using Haskell more these days," especially since Bryan O'Sullivan (author of "Real World Haskell") came aboard. I expect Simon Marlow will continue to influence things in that direction. From 100k feet, Facebook's adoption of Thrift, and Thrift's tradition of supporting polyglot languages, means that a lot of "niche" languages can flourish within the larger production ecosystem.

Re:Leaving Microsoft by tangue on Friday November 23, 2012 @12:29PM (#4822943)
Didn't know about HHVM. Clearly Facebook deserves more credit for all of these gems.