> This turns out to have a lot of complexity lurking within. Slack does not share a common codebase or even runtime; services in the user-facing request path are written in Hack, Go, Java, and C++. This would necessitate a separate implementation in each language.
This sounds crazy. I've seen several products where there is a core stack (e.g. Java) and then surrounding tools, analytics etc in Python, R and others. But why would you create such a mess for your primary user request path?
Sure, they're not "just a chat app" they have video, file sharing etc included and a lot of integrations. But still this sounds like a company that had too much money and too little sense while growing rapidly.
> This turns out to have a lot of complexity lurking within. Slack does not share a common codebase or even runtime; services in the user-facing request path are written in Hack, Go, Java, and C++. This would necessitate a separate implementation in each language.
This sounds crazy. I've seen several products where there is a core stack (e.g. Java) and then surrounding tools, analytics etc in Python, R and others. But why would you create such a mess for your primary user request path?
Sure, they're not "just a chat app" they have video, file sharing etc included and a lot of integrations. But still this sounds like a company that had too much money and too little sense while growing rapidly.