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Discord was (still is?) built on Elixir, which was a descendant of Erlang.

It seems Erlang is comfortable in the niche of "real-time messaging platforms"

They've had some recent-ish blog posts about it

https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...

In my experience, lots of stuff needs to scale massively, but (outside of the better tech companies I guess?) mainstream tools/stacks/approaches are hangovers from n-tier arch days and not really right for it, so the majority of distributed systems are tyre fires.

Ironically I think the original Facebook messaging did something similar, but they changed tech due to their inability to hire developers competent in the language.

So they hired "smart" people who couldn't learn Erlang, an easy language to learn?

I don't think hiring was the issue. See these Quora posts: https://qr.ae/ps8h6J