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

Choosing the right tools for the job


In this section, we present an overview of the different concurrency libraries that we learned about. We take a step back and look at the differences between these libraries, and what they have in common. This summary will give us an insight into what different concurrency abstractions are useful for.

A concurrency framework usually needs to address several concerns:

  • It must provide a way to declare data that is shared between concurrent executions

  • It must provide constructs for reading and modifying program data

  • It must be able to express conditional execution, triggered when a certain set of conditions are fulfilled

  • It must define a way to start concurrent executions

Some of the frameworks from this book address all these concerns; others address only a subset, and transfer part of the responsibility to another framework.

Typically, in a concurrent programming model, we express concurrently shared data differently from data intended to be accessed only from...