Facebook has recently released a collection of C++ software modules that it uses to run the popular website.  With Facebook releasing Folly (the name it designated for the collection), more of the internal programs could become open source since they need different parts of the collection.

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Jordan DeLong, a Facebook software engineer, said one concerning holdup to releasing additional work is that any open source project had to cut away from the dependencies on non-released internal collection code.

Facebook has utilized PHP, MySQL and memcached – all open source software – to run the site. For that reason, the company made the decision to release its internal programs, making them open source. These programs include Thrift service sharing framework, PHP compiler and HipHop.

Facebook developers had the work to rewrite some of the functionality of its collected software to make them open source. With the release of the collection, Facebook could carry on open sourcing portions of it without re-changing the interior wheels.

Developers who have no plans on using the developed applications Facebook has released should still take a gander at it. The reason, DeLong said, was that it included several utilities that could possibility be used in other settings or circumstances. DeLong said many parts found in Folly tend to run quicker than their counterparts seen elsewhere.

He said the idea was to create parts that were quicker and more resourceful than what the company used before. Those utilities were created to be utilized in heavy assembly environments in around thousands of servers.

The componentscover a variety of functionality: one lessens contention and another is intended to consume the memory more effectively. In fact, the AtomicHashMap utility reduces the time spent by an operation in locking an operation.  This tends to slow down performance and lead to logjams in heavily used settings. 

DeLong said people can find the Folly collection on GitHub with Facebook adding more components as they get written.