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>>> WhatsApp was built almost entirely in Erlang + Mnesia. I honestly don't think they could have done it in PHP + Postgres.

They could have done it in Java, C# or Go.

PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby are terrible for fast network applications.




> They could have done it in Java, C# or Go.

Maybe. But I think with much greater difficulty. None of Java, C#, or Go has the built-in distributed processing capability of Erlang.

The last time I looked into it, WhatsApp's infrastructure consisted of 256 2-node clusters, each node of which was capable of supporting between one and two million concurrently open TCP sockets. The 2-node clusters were combined into (IIRC) 16 "islands", some of which were geographically remote, and each of which communicated with the other using a distribution protocol written by WhatsApp in Erlang.




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