Here are Facebook’s 9 top open-source projects from 2013

Facebook and open-source software go together like Jay-Z and Beyoncé — you just can’t have one without the other.

And if Blue Ivy is the product of the latter union, then we must draw parallels between that royal child and Facebook’s React, Rebound, HipHop, and other open-source babies.

As Facebook open-source lead James Pearce writes on the company blog, “Since Facebook’s first line of PHP, and its first MySQL INSERT statement, open source has been a huge part of our engineering philosophy.”

Here’s a quick recap of what Facebook birthed into the open-source community in 2013. (Fair warning: Abandon hope, all ye who are non-technical and enter here.)

1. xctool: a replacement for Apple’s xcodebuild that makes it easier to build and test iOS and Mac projects.
2. Buck: an Android/Java build tool for faster, better Android builds.
3. Rebound: a Java library for animations. Read our full coverage.
4. React: a JavaScript library for building new user interfaces.
5. Regenerator: a Node.js tool to replace generator functions with efficient JavaScript-of-today (ECMAScript 5 or ES5 for short) that behaves the same way.
6. Huxley: a test-like system for catching visual regressions in Web applications. It watches you browse, takes screenshots, and tells you when they change.
7. Presto: a distributed SQL engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes.
8. RocksDB: an embeddable persistent key-value store for fast storage. RocksDB can also be the foundation for a client-server database, but our current focus is on embedded workloads.
9. And released just today, Origami: a free design prototyping kit for Quartz composer. You simply must read our full story on this too-cool tool!

“As the famous Facebook maxim goes, our open source program is still only 1 percent finished,” Pearce concluded.

“We know there is still a huge amount to work on, across each of the major themes above. We’re very lucky to have strong and enthusiastic communities on our projects, and with that comes great responsibility.”