How Python is being used at Google Companies

Note that the following are archives of what people said. I never work for Google. This summary is meant for fanboism towards Python.

Hope readers enjoy it.

How Python is being used inside Google itself[1]:

• “At Google, python is one of the 3 “official languages” alongside with C++ and Java.”
• “The Google build system is written in python.”
• “Google has an internal packaging format like RPM. These packages are created using python.”
• “Binary Data Pusher. This is the area where Alex Martelli is working, on optimizing pushing bits between thousands of servers.”
• “Production servers. All monitoring, restarting and data collection functionality is done with python”
• “Reporting. Logs are analyzed and reports are generated using Python.”
• Note from reference no.1: It is obvious that SWIG is being used to talk between C++ and Python, Cool… Way cool.

How Python is being used inside YouTube[2][3]:

• “Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers.”
• “Requests are routed for handling by a Python application server.”
• “The Python web code is usually NOT the bottleneck, it spends most of its time blocked on RPCs.”
• “Python allows rapid flexible development and deployment. This is critical given the competition they face.”
• “Use psyco, a dynamic python->C compiler that uses a JIT compiler approach to optimize inner loops.” The other way is to use SWIG, wrapping C++ functions so that they are callable by Python.
• “Fully formed Python objects are cached.”  I guess that means The python object is serialized and stored somewhere close to the server’s CPU.  My wild guess is in the memory using Memcached.

References:

1. http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm
2. http://www.python.org/about/quotes/
3. http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture