WhatsApp used Erlang, a programming language designed for building concurrent, distributed systems, to help scale its messaging platform to support millions of users.
Erlang is particularly well-suited to building distributed systems because it was designed to handle failures at the process level rather than the hardware level. This means that if one part of a distributed system built with Erlang fails, the rest of the system can continue to operate without interruption.
This is critical for a messaging platform like WhatsApp, which needs to be able to handle millions of users sending messages simultaneously without experiencing any downtime. Additionally, Erlang's concurrency features allow it to support many thousands of simultaneous connections on a single machine, which is also important for a messaging platform that needs to be able to handle a large volume of traffic.
Erlang is particularly well-suited to building distributed systems because it was designed to handle failures at the process level rather than the hardware level. This means that if one part of a distributed system built with Erlang fails, the rest of the system can continue to operate without interruption.
This is critical for a messaging platform like WhatsApp, which needs to be able to handle millions of users sending messages simultaneously without experiencing any downtime. Additionally, Erlang's concurrency features allow it to support many thousands of simultaneous connections on a single machine, which is also important for a messaging platform that needs to be able to handle a large volume of traffic.