Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta has approved four key design language for its workers and developers to use, with a handful of other languages approved for specific case-by-case usage.
The company’s own Hack programming language is among the four supported languages moving forward; it’s a typesafe variant of the open-source PHP language that works on the HipHop Virtual Machine, and has been around since 2014 where it was first implemented by Facebook.
“It’s important that every language we adopt is the best fit for a particular use case, so we do a high level of diligence whenever we evaluate a language,” Meta told The Register. “Language decisions tend to stick once they’re made, so we want to be deliberate from the onset to give our engineers the best tools to work with.”
Facebook programming languages
Meta also plans to support Rust, Python, and C++ in the move that sees it refine its selection. For data science, apps that use machine learning, and Instagram, Meta specifically recommends Python, while C++ and Rust are best reserved for backend services.
For many, Rust is seen to be a natural progression and even a successor from C++, however recent announcements about Google’s Carbon programming language suggest some consider this a replacement for C++.
Currently, Carbon remains in testing, and there is no word whether Meta plans to support this in the future.
The company will continue to approve “community supported” languages like Java, Erlang, Haskell, and Go, but these are approved for certain cases only, and get less support from Meta.
Moving forward, Meta is working on a new feature that will change the way monetization works on its platforms. Music Revenue Sharing will share revenue between content creators and music artists in a “first of its kind” move.