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Comment by boredpudding | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if they actually use IRC internally, it could just be presenting itself as IRC to have an easy API with tons of libraries offering support. Internally, it could translate IRC calls to whatever their internal architecture wants.

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At least a few years ago it was an actual IRC server and has been since justin.tv. I don’t believe they’ve changed it, as irc clients and bots have continued working with no IRC related changes. (I don’t think they’d invest in providing an IRC gateway; it’d be easier to just abandon it)

An article from late 2015 indicates that IRC is nothing more than an API interface and not their underlying system.

https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2015/12/18/twitch-engineering-an-i...

Huh, cool. Not sure when it changed but https://techcrunch.com/2007/05/22/justin-tv-network-launches... is a source for justintv using IRC

I suppose we could dig into that twitch source code leak to confirm

I thought IRC was just an API interface to begin with? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2812

I can confirm this. Context: part of the engineering team that worked on the chat infrastructure around this time period.

The history is basically:

- v1: IRC API to process scoped servers (Python backend, haxe front end)

- kept API as we migrated backed to go (via a terrible course through nodejs); this version allowed all participants to be in a room together (ie cross process servers).

- once most of background was on go we migrated the front end (can’t remember to what)

- backend then got revved a lot (a specialized team was convened to work on chat infrastructure full time)

I left in 2017, no idea what has happened since.

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