4 Choosing a Language Stack at WeWork

engineering.wework.com posted by kjsteuer 2023 days ago  

Our team has been tasked with building the next generation of Identity infrastructure for WeWork. With the anticipated rate at which WeWork and its sibling businesses are growing, it is important that this new system be efficient, globally distributed, scalable, and permit reasonable evolution as requirements change over the coming years.

Based on these challenges, the team felt it was worth investing the time to compare the available languages and software stacks for building microservices. We had three candidate languages: Go, Kotlin, and Ruby. The comparison was made by building the same realistic component of an Identity system in each. We chose a token mint service, which produces bearer tokens like refresh and access tokens in an OAuth2 based infrastructure. Each language has some precedent in other systems built at WeWork, and each implementation was written by a developer with experience in that language.

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