#9 [ENG] Future of effects in Scala & Moving a query engine from Akka to ZIO
Join us on February 26th for the 9th Wrocław Scala User Group Meetup. This time, the event will be held in English. Check out the details.
As usual we meet in Wędrówki Pub.
‘Future of effects in Scala: Capture checking in practice‘ - Szymon Rodziewicz
Effects are properties of a computation that do not describe the shape or structure of data but are still tracked in the type system. We often use them to describe asynchronous computations, the possibility of returning an error, dependence on the I/O, and many other properties. In Scala, a common way to describe it is to use the monadic types. However, they are often critiqued for being complex, rigid, and hard to compose. To address these issues, the team at EPFL is developing a capture-checking feature that aims to make another approach viable that may not suffer these drawbacks. Let's dive into it and see it in practice!
‘Moving a query engine from Akka to ZIO’ - Tomasz Melcer
Everyone now seems to have their own story on migrating away from Akka. We chose to replace it with ZIO, which we believe is a good fit for what we do: answer live queries in a statistically-correct way using a petabyte worth of data. I'm working in the TV division of Comscore, where we answer our customers' questions about how their TV broadcasts are viewed: who are the people consuming media, what types of content is the most interesting to them. To do so, we have built a custom query engine in Scala and Spark. The talk will explore some of our observations on maintaining and developing a bespoke query engine that is fast, reliable and correct, and why we chose ZIO to move forward.
Speakers:
Szymon works at the Scala 3 Compiler Team at VirtusLab with the Scala Center and EPFL. He leads the Scala Toolkit project and regularly contributes to the Scala 3 compiler and Scala documentation. His interest lies in making programming languages accessible and comfortable to work with. The organizer of the Kraków Scala User Group.
Tomasz Melcer
I work with computing more than I would like to admit. Yet, after all that time, I still like it. My career somehow gravitated towards data storage, data processing, and machine learning. When I'm not coding, I usually play board games or learn (human!) languages.
See you soon!
