372 articles from Meta Engineering.
What’s new: We’ve open-sourced Retrie, a code refactoring tool for Haskell that makes codemodding faster, easier, and safer. Using Retrie, developers can efficiently rewrite large codebases (exceeding 1 million lines), express rewrites as equations in Haskell syntax instead of regular expressions, and avoid large classes of codemodding errors. Retrie’s features include the ability to rewrite […] R
Connectivity is at the heart of our mission to give people the power to build community. We are committed to bringing more people online to a faster internet — and with 3.5 billion people globally unconnected, there is still a lot to do. Africa is currently the least connected continent, with just over a quarter […]
What the research is: New strategies to improve the performance of hardware platforms running Facebook’s microservices. SoftSKU is a novel mechanism that tailors an existing server processor to optimize it for a specific microservice without requiring any additional hardware. Accelerometer is an analytical model that predicts gains from these optimizations even before the custom hardware […] Read
Facebook.com launched in 2004 as a simple, server-rendered PHP website. Over time, we’ve added layer upon layer of new technology to deliver more interactive features. Each of these new features and technologies incrementally slowed the site down and made it harder to maintain. This made it harder to introduce new experiences. Features like dark mode […]
Our connectivity efforts focus on expanding internet access and adoption around the world. This includes our work on technologies like Terragraph, our collaboration with mobile operators on efforts to expand rural access, our work as part of the Telecom Infra Project, and programs like Free Basics. As we’ve continued working on Free Basics, we’ve listened […]
What the research is: A scalable service management platform for Facebook’s stream processing service. Turbine is designed to bridge the gap between the capabilities of existing general-purpose cluster management frameworks like Tupperware and Facebook’s stream processing requirements. In production for several years now, Turbine has enabled a boom in stream processing at Facebook. Turbine is
UPDATE: To continue our support of this public NTP service, we have open-sourced our collection of NTP libraries on GitHub. Almost all of the billions of devices connected to the internet have onboard clocks, which need to be accurate to properly perform their functions. Many clocks contain inaccurate internal oscillators, which can cause seconds of […]
Facebook’s codebase changes frequently each day as engineers develop new features and optimizations for our apps. If not handled properly, each of these changes could potentially regress performance for billions of people around the world. At each step in the development process, we apply a suite of automated regression detection tools to mitigate these risks […]
We are excited to begin rolling out the new version of Messenger on iOS. To make the Messenger iOS app faster, smaller, and simpler, we rebuilt the architecture and rewrote the entire codebase, which is an incredibly rare undertaking and involved engineers from across the company. Compared with the previous iOS version, this new Messenger […]
High-quality internet access opens new opportunities to make yourself heard, connect with the people and communities you care about, and build new businesses. It’s also good for industries and businesses of all kinds, including Facebook. The latest edition of our Inclusive Internet Index shows progress on bringing broadband access to more people, but the rate […]
We recently hosted the third annual ZooKeeper Meetup@Facebook in Menlo Park, featuring technical talks focused on new performance, scalability, and security features implemented at large-scale companies with complex distributed systems. Events such as these are important for building community among peers across the industry. Speakers from Cloudera, Facebook, Salesforce, San José State University,
Last year was a busy one for our open source engineers. In 2019 we released 170 new open source projects, bringing our portfolio to a total of 579 active repositories. While it’s important for our internal engineers to contribute to these projects (and they certainly do — with more than 82,000 commits this year), we […]