Its continuous development Facebook relies on a lot of things - some of them require moves of impression that most people do not understand, such as the acquisition of WhatsApp for 19 billion and but they are somewhat more prosaic. A good example is the news that came today that states that the company released a new Open Source language that, in true Silicon Valley style, he called, hack.
The company needs to have its own language that can be used by third-party developers so that it is able to have faster and functionalbetter results. This is where the Hack programming language comes in, which has already been used within Facebook for a year, and aims to make the development process much faster. In fact, it has proven so effective that Facebook plans to switch to it to shape the future. Regarding the reasoning behind the Hack language, Facebook states:
With thousands of technicians working on millions of lines of code at Facebook, the procalls have escalated. We had a simple language for a quick feedback, but could we mitigate the problems? Could we detect errors with rapid iteration, and invest in development with PHP? Could improved analysis and code introspection help developers become more productive with tools like autocomplete? Traditionally, dynamically generated languages provide rapid development, while sacrificing the ability to catch errors early and review code quickly, especially in larger codebases. In contrast, statically typed languages provide more of a safety net, but often at the expense of fast iteration. We thought there had to be a common ground there.
The idea of Hack is to combine more static languages like C, with more dynamic ones like PHP. The difference is that static languages incorporate error checking in the encoding process, while more modern languages allow developers to encode with bugs, and try everything when they run the project.
From the blog post of the company:
“Traditionally, dynamically generated languages allow rapid development, but sacrifice the ability to catch errors early and review them quickly, especially in larger codebases. In contrast, static development languages provide more of a safety net, but often at the expense of rapid iteration. We thought there had to be a sweet spot. Thus, the Hack language was born. We believe that it offers the best of both languages: dynamic and static, and that this is something that is valuable for young and old alike projects.
