By releasing this library, called Folly, Facebook will be able to release more of its internal programs as open source, because they rely on different components in this library.

"One clear bottleneck to releasing more work has been that any open sourced project needed to break dependencies on unreleased internal library code," wrote Facebook software engineer Jordan DeLong, who posted an entry on Facebook announcing the release.

Facebook engineers also announced the release at a C++ conference the company is holding Saturday at its campus at Menlo Park, California.

Facebook has relied on open-source software, such as MySQL, PHP and memcached, to run its sites. And so the company has made a point of releasing its own internal programs as open-source software as well, such as the and the service sharing framework.

For many of its open source releases though, Facebook developers have had to rewrite some of the functionality that was borrowed from this library. By releasing the library itself, Facebook will be able to "continue open sourcing parts of [its] stack without resorting to reinventing ... internal wheels," DeLong wrote.