Ask HN: For a Facebook clone in 2019 what tech stack would you use?

5 points·lumberjack··9 comments

Ideally looking for some framework or such that handles the boring stuff like automatically.

My 2 cents, at Facebook scale there is no framework that will handle all the "boring stuff".

I am not even sure what you even mean by boring stuff. But if you are like some of the devs I have worked with I have heard over and over why do we have to write all this CRUD for forms and dashboards etc.

There are no shortcuts, and no frameworks that just magically solve all the problems without introducing tradeoffs.

> Ideally looking for some framework or such that handles the boring stuff like automatically

Lol, you're going to have to put in lots and lots of effort, no matter what stack you use. What do you even mean by "boring stuff"?

You can stretch Rails a whole lot these days -- so much so that by the time Rails is the bottleneck, you can probably afford to hire primo engineers to refactor to better tools.

I would however build the real-time chat system with Elixir and Phoenix. Just knock that out and not worry about chat performance for a very long time.

So I would build the main app with Rails. And the chat system with Elixir.

Translation: "Want to make a lot of money but don't want to put in the work"

At Facebook scale, there can be no one solution, it has to be purpose built for use cases.

Scala, scala.js, postgres and casandra. There are no shortcuts .

React and firebase

React would be ok but Firebase at Facebook scale would be insanely expensive. There has to be something self hosted. And may be custom built.

Yeah but this person doesn’t want to deal with boring stuff.

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