Book Image

Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

By : Prokopec
Book Image

Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

By: 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 (11 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we learned how STM works and how to apply it in concurrent programs. We saw the advantages of using STM's transactional references and atomic blocks over the synchronized statements, and investigated their interaction with side effects. We studied the semantics of exception handling inside transactions and learned how to retry and conditionally re-execute transactions. Finally, we learned about transactional collections, which allow us to encode shared program data more efficiently.

These features together enable a concurrent programming model in which the programmer can focus on expressing the meaning of the program, without having to worry about handling lock objects, or avoiding deadlocks and race conditions. This is especially important when it comes to modularity. It is hard or near impossible to reason about deadlocks or race conditions in the presence of separate software components. STM exists to liberate the programmer from such concerns, and is essential...