I’ve been beating the drum this year (see the last section of the talk) that the biggest problem facing C++ today is the lack of a large set of de jure and de facto standard libraries. My team at Microsoft just recently announced Casablanca, a cloud-oriented C++ library and that we intend to open source, and we’re making other even bigger efforts that I hope will bear fruit and I’ll be able to share soon. But it can’t be just one company – many companies have already shared great open libraries on the past, but still more of us have to step up.

In that vein, I was extremely happy to see another effort come to fruition today. A few hours ago I was at Facebook to speak at their C++ day, and I got to be in the room when Andrei Alexandrescu dropped his arm to officially launch Folly:

Folly: The Facebook Open Source Library by Jordan DeLong on Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 2:59pm · Facebook is built on open source from top to bottom, and could not exist without it. As engineers here, we use, contribute to, and release a lot of open source software, including pieces of our core infrastructure such as HipHop and Thrift. But in our C++ services code, one clear bottleneck to releasing more work has been that any open sourced project needed to break dependencies on unreleased internal library code. To help solve that problem, today we open sourced an initial release of Folly, a collection of reusable C++ library artifacts developed and used at Facebook. This announcement was made at our C++ conference at Facebook in Menlo Park, CA. Our primary aim with this ‘foolishness’ is to create a solution that allows us to continue open sourcing parts of our stack without resorting to reinventing some of our internal wheels. And because Folly’s components typically perform significantly faster than counterparts available elsewhere, are easy to use, and complement existing libraries, we think C++ developers might find parts of this library interesting in their own right.

Andrei announced that Folly stood for the F acebook O pen Ll ibrar y . He claimed it was a Welsh name, which is even funnier when said by a charming Romanian man.

Microsoft, and I personally, would like to congratulate Facebook on this release! Getting more high-quality open C++ libraries is a Good Thing, and I think it is safe to say that Casablanca and Folly are just the beginning. There’s a lot more coming across our industry this year. Stay tuned.