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

Using parallel collections


Most of the concurrent programming utilities we have studied so far are used in order to enable different threads of computation to exchange information. Atomic variables, the synchronized statement, concurrent queues, futures, and promises are focused on ensuring the correctness of a concurrent program. On the other hand, the parallel collection programming model is designed to be largely identical to that of sequential Scala collections; parallel collections exist solely in order to improve the running time of the program. In this chapter, we will measure the relative speedup of programs using parallel collections. To make this task easier, we will introduce the timed method to the package object used for the examples in this chapter. This method takes a block of code body, and returns the running time of the executing block of code body. It starts by recording the current time with the nanoTime method from the JDK System class. It then runs the body, records...