What tech stacks do the worlds biggest apps use?

Do they publish their stacks or is it mostly a case of guesswork? Twitter facebook instagram snapchat tiktok google et all. Used to be well known Google used Python for their search engine but is that still the case with the scale it is at now? I wonder if they keep their stacks a secret as a competitve advantage?

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Twitter was built on Rails, though they now only use it partly, I think?

Bleacher Report and Pinterest use Elixir, WhatsApp uses Erlang.

I ‘think’ Instagram use Python? No idea about TikTok, SC or Facebook tho…

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Facebook was build from PHP, but they later created their a PHP transpiler HipHop for PHP which was later replaced by a virtual machine HHVM. This VM runs Hack which is suppose to be a dialect of PHP.

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Discord too is using Elixir. They also combine it with Rust in some places where performance really matters.

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Lately I’ve been hearing that a lot of financial stock / crypto exchanges use Go and, increasingly, Rust. No clue about any frameworks though, those languages encourage the build-it-yourself mindset.

I’ve known several e-commerce and business-to-business companies that are fighting tooth and nail to get rid of their Rails stacks and move to Elixir. One of them transitioned to F# instead.

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Some big names I’ve seen/spoke to/been aware of:

Guardian: Scala
The Financial Times: NodeJS
Daily Mail: Clojure
Walmart: NodeJS
Heroku: Ruby, Go, Erlang
Atlassian: Java
Tesco: C#, NodeJS
Reddit: Python
Google: Java, C++, Python, Go
Nationwide Building Society: C#, NodeJS
Santander: A proprietary graphical programming language, C#
HSCB: C#
Wikipedia: PHP

I was talking to a Pinterest employee last year and they said that they stopped using Elixir.

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Ah that’s a shame, I wonder why…

Good list! Wonder which big name will be using Gleam first? :nerd_face:

Ah thanks! I keep forgetting about Discord! :man_facepalming: :laughing:

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