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 Software Transactional Memory


In this section, we will study the basics of using STM. Historically, multiple STM implementations were introduced for Scala and the JVM platform. The particular STM implementation described in this chapter is called ScalaSTM. There are two reasons that ScalaSTM is our STM of choice. First, ScalaSTM was authored by a group of STM experts who agreed on a standardized set of APIs and features. Future STM implementations for Scala are strongly encouraged to implement these APIs. Second, the ScalaSTM API is designed for multiple STM implementations, and comes with an efficient default implementation. Different STM implementations can be chosen when the program starts. Users can write applications using a standardized API, and seamlessly switch to a different STM implementation later.

The atomic statement is a fundamental abstraction at the core of every STM. When the program executes a block of code marked with the atomic symbol, it starts a memory transaction...