Fighting spam with pure functions
Jan 24, 2013Louis Brandy

Summary
Introduced FXL (Feature eXtraction Language), a domain-specific language optimized for spam fighting at Facebook. FXL is a subset of Standard ML designed for efficient data fetching across the graph. Its core innovation is the use of pure functions, which enables automatic optimizations like batching of data requests (leading to a ~20x speedup) and memoization of common expressions, significantly improving performance and enabling rapid adaptation to new spam threats.
More from the Site Reliability and Outage Management trail
- Lights Out, Systems On: Validating Instant Power Loss Readiness
- DrP: Meta’s Root Cause Analysis Platform at Scale
- Zoomer: Powering AI Performance at Meta’s Scale Through Intelligent Debugging and Optimization
- Diff Risk Score: AI-driven risk-aware software development
- How Meta keeps its AI hardware reliable