Ever wondered how Facebook is able to assemble personalized news feeds, in real time, for any of its billion-plus users who may log in at any given moment? Now we know, because the company has just released the source code behind the magic.

Drawing from their considerable expertise running large workloads, Facebook engineers developed a framework, called Folly Futures, that allows programmers to easily break apart their C++ applications so they can run more quickly in parallel, or asynchronously.

The framework allowed Facebook to cut the average latency of its news feed by two-thirds, and significantly reduced the number of time-out errors that users see.

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