Facebook Open Sources Library of its Components

Even as Facebook continues making headlines in the wake of its IPO and a precipitous drop in its share price, the company has made a big contribution to open source. Not everyone realizes that Facebook is built on open source technology, and it has released many components to the open source community before. Now, as Jordan DeLong explains in an extensive post, the company has released a reusable C++ library of components called Folly.

You can find Folly on GitHub, here. As DeLong notes:

"The utilities contained in Folly are things we use heavily in production—this is code that runs on thousands of servers doing work on behalf of 900 million users every day. These utilities are loosely connected, but the over-arching theme for all of the components is high performance at scale. Some of them will show a fairly specialized focus, like reducing contention or packing things into small amounts of memory. Others, such as our in-memory JSON manipulation library or our string-formatting library, have a larger scope. But in either case, our motivation was to build components that were faster and more efficient than what we previously used."

"This initial release is definitely in the spirit of 'release early, release often.' We will continue to update the open source tree as new Folly components are added, so you can expect to see more of this on github in the future."

You can find out much more about the individual components in Folly here.  Previously, Facebook has released many other open source components, including pieces of its core infrastructure such as HipHop and Thrift.