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Twitter On Scala

Posted by kdawson on from the going-off-the-rails dept.

machaut writes "Twitter, one of the highest profile Ruby on Rails-backed websites on the Internet, has in the past year started replacing some of their Ruby infrastructure with an emerging language called Scala, developed by Martin Odersky at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Although they still prefer Ruby on Rails for user-facing web applications, Twitter's developers have started replacing Ruby daemon servers with Scala alternatives, and plan eventually to serve API requests, which comprise the majority of their traffic, with Scala instead of Ruby. This week several articles have appeared that discuss this shift at Twitter. A technical interview with three Twitter developers was published on Artima. One of those developers, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead, gave a talk on this subject at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, which was covered by Technology Review and The Register."

2 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. There you go again! by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ruby does not have a problem scaling. Neither, for that matter, does even Rails. (As the companies that run Basecamp, Campfire, LinkedIn, Lighthouse, and many others will tell you.)

    The fact is that the Twitter folks tried to write their own message queue in Ruby, when there was absolutely no reason to do so: there were plenty of pre-made message queues already available for Ruby, and already optimized. Not only did they choose to write their own, unnecessarily, they did it badly.

    And not only that, but Alex Payne has a hidden agenda: he is trying to push Scala to boost interest in the book about Scala he just wrote!

    Please get some facts before digging up this long-dead and well-buried "Ruby or Rails doesn't scale" bullshit again.

  2. Here is an interesting discussion on alternatives by tieTYT · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://unlimitednovelty.com/2009/04/twitter-blaming-ruby-for-their-mistakes.html

    This blog post takes the attitude that Twitter didn't move to Scala because ROR had a problem, but because the in-house messaging system Twitter created performed poorly. The author does not work at Twitter but many of the Twitter developers (including Alex Payne) respond in the comments. I found the article to be very interesting and the comments even more so. They give a sense of how much research Twitter did before this change.