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Comment by DarkNova6 | Hacker News Reader

Most of Facebook is built on PHP. I’m surprised they didn’t choose Laravel.

It turns out calling the app "Threads by Instagram" is not just a branding gimmick. The Instagram backend was always Python/Django since before the acquisition.

That's pretty interesting, I wonder if that means that it's build by a team at Instagram, and not Facebook. I'd assume so.

I get that Facebook is still a huge success, but I do find it telling that they opted to put Threads under Instagram, rather than Facebook.

I think its pretty obvious they went with Instagram branding, as Facebook branding has been tarnished for a while.

I'm confused.

It's Facebook by Meta. Instagram by Meta. Why isn't it Threads by Meta?

Tied to ig account.

Threads by Instagram by Meta ... TIM for short.

Laravel is not a requirement to use PHP effectively.

Oh, I know. But as a joke I chose the most well known framework.

Personally evren I prefer php over python.

Laravel wasn't created until 2010/11~

The web codebase was once written in PHP, but they moved away from that a decade ago.

It’s still very similar to php. Same syntax, same execution model. If you look at some hack snippets you would think it’s php (because it mostly is).

Switching from hack to php and viceversa should be extremely easy.

That being said, they chose python because Instagram is written in python, they are probably using a lot of existing libraries.

That wouldn't even make sense. They created hack/hhvm to scale and optimize the platform and codebase. Taking a step backwards and refactoring (hack != php now) would be a horrible idea.

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