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

Custom concurrent data structures


In this section, we will show how to design a concurrent data structure. The data structure we will use as a running example will be simple, but sufficient to demonstrate the general approach. You will be able to apply the same principles to more complex data structures.

Before we start, there is a disclaimer. Designing a concurrent data structure is hard, and, as a rule of the thumb, you should almost never do it. Even if you manage to implement a correct and efficient concurrent data structure, the cost of doing so is usually high.

There are several reasons why designing a concurrent data structure is hard. The first is achieving correctness: errors are much harder to notice, reproduce, or analyze due to inherent non-determinism. Then, operations must not slow down when more processors use the data structure. In other words, the data structure must be scalable. Finally, a concurrent data structure must be efficient in absolute terms, and it must not be much...