Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on Threads yesterday that the number of Threads registrations officially launched on Wednesday has exceeded 30 million.
Threads is a text-based social application, and although it can't really replace Twitter in terms of functionality, it currently appears to be a de facto Twitter alternative.
Although Facebook has already used PHP to perfection, the new product released this time does not use PHP as the back-end development language. According to the information disclosed by CPython core developer Łukasz Langa , the Threads backend is built with Python 3.10—Meta has built its internal high-performance branch Cinder based on CPython 3.10.
According to reports, Cinder has many optimizations for performance, including JIT, lazy loading modules, precompiled static modules, bytecode inline caching, on-the-fly evaluation of coroutines, and an experimental bytecode compiler that uses type Annotations to generate type-specific bytecode that performs better in the JIT.
Cinder provides backend support for Instagram and is used in a growing number of Python applications in Meta.
According to the Threads engineer , Threads, like Instagram, uses Django as the web server, and all performance-intensive tasks are placed in various C++ aggregators and recommendation-type services.
Of course, they've heavily customized the Django base so it runs on a custom Python JIT and uses a Facebook-developed database (also used for IG and FB).
The engineer also said that when he first joined Instagram in 2019, they were running native Python in production. A custom JIT is used now - although relatively new.
He also said that this is what Facebook has always done-to create new products with an interface that is roughly similar to existing ones, and then gradually replace the back-end modules as needed, rather than doing a large-scale rewrite.
After all, for such a large social application, the programming language used by the web server is not so important compared with the performance of the database.
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