Programming Language & Code used to develop Facebook, Google, Windows, Apple’s OS, Linux & others

Top software and the programming language in which they are written

We always hear that this programming language is good or that is better. We get the most popular programming languages list from aย variety of sources like Stack Exchange, TIOBE, Github, etc. But do you know which programming languages are actually used in writing popular software like Google’s Chrome or Microsoft’s Office (Excel, Word and Powerpoint)?

Contrary to popular ย perception, most popular software are forks of different coding languages which means that the tech companies use different programming languages to make the software. However, some software also use a single coding language. Here are some popular software and their programming languages.

Table Of Contents

Google Search :

BackRub (Google’s first incarnation) was written in Java and Python.ย Now, Google’s front end is written in C and C++ and its famous crawlers (Spyders) wereย written in Python. However, theย  crawler kept crashing, and indexes got stale with old information, therefore Google developed a new crawler (capable of incremental index updates) written in C++.

Google Chrome :

Google Chrome is written in C++, Assembly and Python

Adobe

All Adobe products (Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator, etc) are written in C/C++ and embed Javascript (Adobe calls their implementation ActionScript), and then the UI etc. are written in Javascript.

Microsoft

Microsoft products (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) are written in C/C++, embed a VB engine and the UI etc. are written in VB. Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system is written inย C++ while its kernel is written in C.

Apple

Apple’s Mac OS X is written in Objective C while its kernel is also written in C. The IO PnP subsystem in Mac OS X uses Embedded C++.

Linux

Most of the Linux is written in C programming language. Most Apps are ย written in Python, KDE is all C++. ย All Linux kernels use Assembly code as well.

AutoCAD

The first release of AutoCAD is purely written in C and some parts in Assembly. The current version however, is written fully in C++. The popular AutoCAD wrappers are written in AutoLISP, Visual LISP, VBA, ย Dot NET and JavaScript.

YouTube

YouTube was initially written in PHP, but they switched to Python very early in their history. They stuck with Python all the way until they were acquired by Google.

Facebook

Most of the popular blue UI front end that we see today on Facebook ย is written in PHP, Much of it is written using XHP, and the runtime is HipHop for PHP. Facebook also uses a lot of JavaScript and Erlang.

Dropbox

The world’s most popular cloud storage App uses Python as its main programming language.

Quora

The creators of Quora, who used to work for Facebook, chose Python because itโ€™s expressive and quick to write. LiveNode, one of the internal systems that manages the display of content on the web page, is partly written in Python.

Reddit

Reddit one of the biggest communities of the web and its registered users, people like you, provide the content. Originally written in Common Lisp, it was rewritten in Python in 2005 to gain greater development flexibility and access to Pythonโ€™s plethora of code libraries.

We will continue to update the Software and their programming langauges.

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