Comment by motorest
4 days ago
> sure, but instagram was created by a handful of people with python and got a billion dollar exit in 2012.
Facebook famously felt compelled to hire eminent C++ experts to help them migrate away from their PHP backend. I still recall reading posts on the Instagram Engineering blog on how and where they used C++.
And then HipHop failed to provide as much gains as they hoped for versus the Hack JIT implementation, thus Facebook keeps writing mostly PHP like code in many of their workloads.
> And then HipHop failed to provide as much gains as they hoped (...)
What point do you think you're making?
That the C++ migration in the end did not achieve everything they were trying to get out of it, and another more productive approach was chosen in the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM