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super-app

consumer super-apps with mini-program platforms

WeChat, Alipay, Grab, Gojek, Paytm

SystemTechniques · 22Primitives · 86 super-app CDN and edgecloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.›Javascript event loopcompilers · medium: Task and microtask queues, rendering steps, timers and promise job ordering in JS hostsDeterministic simulation testingdistributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.›Incremental sync cursorsdistributed · medium: The client keeps one opaque token; each pull returns only the changes after it plus the next token, so sync cost scales with what changed, not with the dataset.›Presence trackingdistributed · medium: Heartbeats refresh per-connection TTLs; a user is online while any connection lives, with a grace period that hides reconnect flaps.›Primary-backup replicationdistributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.›Pub/sub fan-outdistributed · medium: Deliver one published message to every subscriber of a topic by sharing one encoded payload and giving each connection a bounded queue with an explicit slow-consumer policy.›Message sequence numbersdistributed · low: A per-stream counter on every message lets the receiver detect loss, duplicates and reordering, ack cheaply and resume after reconnect with "send from N".›Idempotency keysfinance · low: Client-chosen unique key per logical operation, stored with a request fingerprint and the final response, so retries replay the first result instead of acting twice.›BM25 rankingsearch-sort · low: The standard lexical relevance score: IDF-weighted term frequency with saturation (k1) and length normalization (b); default in Lucene, Elasticsearch and SQLite FTS5.›Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.›Hdr histogramdata-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentilesConsistent hashingdistributed · low: Hash nodes and keys onto a ring; each key belongs to the next node clockwise, so membership changes move only about 1/n of keys.›Distributed ID generationdistributed · low: Mint unique, roughly time-sorted IDs on many nodes with no per-ID coordination: Snowflake (time, worker, sequence) or UUIDv7 (time, random).›Double-entry ledgerfinance · low: Append-only journal of transactions whose postings sum to zero per currency; balances are derived, so money can only move, never appear or vanish.›Process supervisionhardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.›WebSocketsnetworking · low: Full-duplex message framing over one upgraded HTTP connection; the standard way to push real-time data to browsers.›Aho-Corasick multi-pattern matchingsearch-sort · low: Find all occurrences of many fixed patterns in one pass over the text, in time independent of the pattern count, using a trie with failure links.›Digital signatures (Ed25519)security · low: Small, fast, deterministic public-key signatures that prove who produced a message; the default for tokens, releases and protocols.›Mutual TLSsecurity · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.›OAuth 2 and OpenID Connectsecurity · low: Delegated authorization (OAuth 2) and login on top of it (OIDC); use authorization code + PKCE for every user-facing client.›Deterministic bucketingsystems · low: Hash a stable unit id with a per-purpose salt into a bucket; "in" means bucket below the percentage, so assignment is stateless, repeatable and only grows on ramp-up.›Graceful drainingsystems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.›+ 15 more techniques+ 70 more primitives

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