Scalac's blog

Why Monix In this short blog post – in just 10 minutes or less –  I’m going to attempt to present what Monix library is and try to convince you why you really need to get to know it. Formerly known as Monifu, Monix is a library for asynchronous programming in Scala and Scala.js It contains several […]

In this post, we will look at how primitive Scala types such as Int and Long are represented down to the bytecode level. This will help us understand what the performance effects of using them in generic classes are. We will also explore the functionalities that the Scala compiler provides us for mitigating such performance penalties. Furthermore, we will […]

In this post I will try to present what is GraphStage in Akka Streams. My goal is to describe when it’s useful and how to use it correctly. I will start with outlining key terminology, then proceed with simple example and after that the main use case will be covered. For the latter the most upvoted issue of akka-http […]

Type classes in Scala Type classes are a powerful and flexible concept that adds ad-hoc polymorphism to Scala. They are not a first-class citizen in the language, but other built-in mechanisms allow to write them in Scala. This is the reason why they are not so obvious to spot in code and one can have […]

A very common scenario in many kinds of software is when the input data is potentially unlimited and it can appear at arbitrary intervals. The common way of handling such cases is using the Observer pattern in its imperative form – callbacks. But this approach creates what’s commonly called “Callback Hell”. It’s a concept basically […]

For some time now Spark has been offering a Pipeline API (available in MLlib module) which facilitates building sequences of transformers and estimators in order to process the data and build a model. Moreover, Spark MLlib module ships with a plethora of custom transformers that make the process of data transformation easy and painless. But […]

Part of the success of modern application is targeting it globally – all over the world. It isn’t possible to run such application on a single machine, even with most powerful hardware. Definitions like Distributed computing or Reactive applications were born in the process of IT globalization. Nowadays, applications run on multiple virtual machines distributed over multiple physical machines […]

When operating an Akka cluster the developer must consider how to handle network partitions (Split Brain scenarios) and machine crashes. There are multiple strategies to handle such erratic behavior and, after a deeper explanation of the problem we are facing, I will try to present them along with their pros and cons using the Split […]

Scala is all about type-safety and making the compiler work for you. But what if we need to use SQL which is not a part of Scala? The compiler is not able to validate and type check raw queries. The solution for that problem is Domain Specific Language (DSL). We already have Slick that provides DSL for […]

Back in the day, business used to be much simpler. The only requirements were all-in-one straightforward solutions which usually ended up as monoliths. And because of that, supporting systems used to be much simpler too. However, over time the risk of ending up with a clumsy, too tightly-coupled system became greater and greater. These days, […]