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 app developed by the Instagram team. Although it can't really replace Twitter in terms of functionality, it seems to be a de facto alternative to Twitter at present.
As mentioned above, Threads was built by the Instagram team, so this new product does not use Facebook's superb PHP as the back-end development language. Anti-bar note: Facebook’s technology stack is not just PHP, they have also developed many black technologies, such as Hack Lang, HHVM According to the information disclosed by CPython core developer Łukasz Langa, the Threads backend is built with Python 3.10 — Meta is based on CPython 3.10 built its own high-performance fork Cinder for internal use .
Cinder's introduction shows that it provides backend support for Instagram and is used in a growing number of Python applications in Meta.
In addition, Cinder has developed many new features for performance optimization, including JIT, lazy loading modules, precompiled static modules, bytecode inline caching, on-the-fly evaluation of coroutines, and an experimental bytecode compiler. The compiler uses type annotations to generate type-specific bytecode that performs better in the JIT.
According to the Threads engineer, Threads uses Django as the web server like Instagram, 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 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-creating new products with an interface roughly similar to existing ones, and then gradually replacing 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 to the performance of the database.
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