Thank You Facebook and Instagram for supporting the Python Software Foundation!

Introducing Facebook and Instagram PyCon 2019 Principal Sponsors!

Facebook and Instagram have been big supporters of the Python language through sponsored development of PyTorch and Pyre. This year the PSF is proud to have Facebook and Instagram as Principal Sponsors of our foundation and PyCon 2019 in Cleveland. They want to share the variety of ways they're not only using Python but how they’ve implemented it in creating, teaching, and developing their programs. We spoke with them to find out more about their recent efforts in the Python community, and here’s what they had to share regarding the integration of Python in their systems by team.

Facebook Production Engineering



There are engineers within Facebook that are 100% focused on maintaining the Python infrastructure of the other developers that use Python.

There's a whole category of software written at Facebook that's basically like the glue that holds all the other software together. The vast majority of that glue (code) is written in Python. We do that because it's not code for which performance is absolutely paramount because typically a user is using some tool or we're doing some kind of configuration. Python is so easy to use and easy to change and really flexible, so it helps us write good tools really quickly.



Instagram



Instagram employs Python in one of the world's largest settings, using it to serve 1 billion monthly active users. Python was chosen because of its reputation for simplicity and practicality, which aligns well with Instagram’s philosophy of “do the simple thing first.”

For more information about how PyCon is used at Instagram, check out the following links:

Releasing the World's Largest Python Site Every 7 Minutes
How to JIT: Writing a Python JIT from scratch in pure Python
Instagram Makes a Smooth Move to Python 3
Copy-on-write friendly Python garbage collection
Profiling CPython at Instagram

For those attending PyCon this year, Instagram production engineering manager Shuhong Wong will be giving a presentation entitled Releasing the World’s Largest Python Site Every 7 Minutes on Saturday from 10:50 am to 11:20 am. Come by Grand Ballroom A to learn more.

PyTorch

PyTorch is a library for machine learning and deep learning specifically. The thing that makes PyTorch popular within the research community and also at Facebook is that it's very deeply integrated with the Python numerical computing ecosystem.

With PyTorch, the primary interface for users is in Python, but a lot of the internals are written in C++. There are several different types of people who use PyTorch, such as our Facebook AI research scientists. They use Python every day to prototype and experiment with different model architectures, with different strategies, and it lets them move extremely quickly and iterate rapidly because it's such a flexible base.

Pyre

Facebook and Instagram have built Pyre, a typechecker for Python that is optimized for large codebases that change frequently. It is the default type checker for Instagram Server code, as well as a large number of backend Python projects. Tools like Pyre make it easier and faster to build high quality products in Python.

There are several open-sourced Python projects at Facebook, such as FBOSS CLI, bowler, xar, and so on. Visit the Facebook booth at PyCon to learn more.

For those attending PyCon this year, Facebook software engineer Shannon Zhu will be giving a presentation entitled Leveraging the Type System to Write Secure Applications on Saturday from 2:35 pm to 3:05 pm. Come by Grand Ballroom A to check it out.