Book Image

Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

By : Aleksandar Prokopec
Book Image

Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

By: Aleksandar Prokopec

Overview of this book

Scala is a modern, multiparadigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala smoothly integrates the features of object-oriented and functional languages. In this second edition, you will find updated coverage of the Scala 2.12 platform. The Scala 2.12 series targets Java 8 and requires it for execution. The book starts by introducing you to the foundations of concurrent programming on the JVM, outlining the basics of the Java Memory Model, and then shows some of the classic building blocks of concurrency, such as the atomic variables, thread pools, and concurrent data structures, along with the caveats of traditional concurrency. The book then walks you through different high-level concurrency abstractions, each tailored toward a specific class of programming tasks, while touching on the latest advancements of async programming capabilities of Scala. It also covers some useful patterns and idioms to use with the techniques described. Finally, the book presents an overview of when to use which concurrency library and demonstrates how they all work together, and then presents new exciting approaches to building concurrent and distributed systems. Who this book is written for If you are a Scala programmer with no prior knowledge of concurrent programming, or seeking to broaden your existing knowledge about concurrency, this book is for you. Basic knowledge of the Scala programming language will be helpful.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Exercises


In the following set of exercises, you are required to implement higher-level concurrency abstractions in terms of basic JVM concurrency primitives. Some of these exercises introduce concurrent counterparts of sequential programming abstractions, and, in doing so, highlight important differences between sequential and concurrent programming. The exercises are not ordered in any particular order, but some of them rely on specific content from earlier exercises or this chapter:

  1. Implement a parallel method, which takes two computation blocks, a and b, and starts each of them in a new thread. The method must return a tuple with the result values of both the computations. It should have the following signature:

                def parallel[A, B](a: =>A, b: =>B): (A, B) 
    
  2. Implement a periodically method, which takes a time interval duration specified in milliseconds, and a computation block b. The method starts a thread that executes the computation block b every duration milliseconds...