Facebook Shares Its 2019 Year in Review for Open Source

Open-source developer advocate Dmitry Vinnik said in a blog post that the social network’s internal engineers contributed more than 82,000 commits in 2019, while some 2,500 external contributors committed over 32,000 changes.

He added that almost 93,000 new people starred Facebook’s open-source projects last year.

Vinnik shared highlights of Facebook’s collaboration efforts in support of open-source projects, including two initiatives in partnership with the Linux Foundation: the GraphQL Foundation and the Presto Foundation.

Facebook expanded on its open-source deep-learning platform, PyTorch, with the debut of PyTorch Mobile, as well as the additions of CrypTen, a framework for privacy-preserving machine learning, and Captum, a model interpretability and understanding library.

The social network also added support for free Jupyter notebook environment Google Colaboratory to its PyTorch tutorials.

On the topic of web and mobile open-source offerings, Vinnik said React and React Native remained very active, and he spotlighted the open-source releases of Hermes, a JavaScript engine optimized for mobile applications, and Magma, a platform that enables operators to deploy mobile networks in a timely fashion.

Late in the year, Facebook released Hydra, a framework that simplifies the development of Python apps by allowing developers to compose and override configurations.

Finally, Vinnik touched on the social network’s work on the blockchain front with the Libra Association via its Calibra subsidiary.

He wrote, “Overall, it has been an excellent year for open source, with many new projects being released and existing communities growing more rapidly than we expected. We want to end this post the same way we started it—by thanking all our internal and external contributors, those who use our open-source tools and frameworks and those who give back to the community. We appreciate you and look forward to working with everyone in the years to come.”