Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Building blocks of concurrency


Scala is a JVM-based language, so programs written in Scala run in JVM. JVM, as we already know, is Java Virtual Machine, and runs as a single process in our operating system. In JVM, one of the basic concurrency constructs is a thread; we can create/use multiple threads as part of our Scala program. So, for a basic understanding of processes and threads, let's go through them.

Understanding processes and threads

Think of a process as a program or application that our computer might have to run. This process is going to have some code that's executable, a process identifier (pid), and at least one thread of execution. The process might consume some computer resources as well, such as memory. Every process isolates itself from other processes when it comes to consume memory; this means two processes cannot use the same memory block.

Modern computers come with multiple processor cores. These cores are assigned tasks as executable program parts for execution in certain...