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Comment by madaraz | Hacker News Reader

There is a reason that NO major web application you name is written in C++, Gmail, Facebook, Google Docs, YouTube. There are major advantages to writing web applications in a higher level language and almost no advantages to writing them in C++.

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Gmail was originally mostly C++ (server-side), see http://www.quora.com/What-programming-languages-is-Gmail-imp...

www.google.com remains C++ to the best of my knowledge, see http://web.archive.org/web/20110708015633/http://panela.blog...

I doubt that the parts of YouTube responsible for video-related heavy-lifting (transcoding, detecting copyright infringement, etc.) are written in a dynamic language like Python, Ruby or PHP or even a managed language like Java.

I always imagined that they just patch together a bunch of calls to mplayer and ffmpeg using a bit of shell script.. ;)

Maybe, but this won't do when you actually have to do algorithmic processing of the video (which I think Youtube does after all).

and by "algorithmic processing" I mean detecting when the video contains a pirated song, for example.

I'm sure you could script that out to somone else... :oP

YouTube optimizes their Python with psyco: http://www.slideshare.net/didip/super-sizing-youtube-with-py...

unless you are google and running at huge scale. then its C++ because they can hire a huge crowd of newbies from an elite university to maintain it and the cost divided across their huge server base is zero.

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