First of all, I would like to thank my reviewers, Samira Tasharofi, Lukas Rytz, Dominik Gruntz, Michel Schinz, Zhen Li, and Vladimir Kostyukov for their excellent feedback and useful comments. I would also like to thank the editors at Packt, Kevin Colaco, Sruthi Kutty, Kapil Hemnani, Vaibhav Pawar, and Sebastian Rodrigues for their help with writing this book. It really was a pleasure to work with these people.
The concurrency frameworks described in this book wouldn’t have seen the light of the day without a collaborative effort of a large number of people. Many individuals have somehow, directly or indirectly, contributed to the development of these utilities. These people are the true heroes of Scala concurrency, and they are to thank for Scala’s excellent support for concurrent programming. It is difficult to enumerate all of them here, but I tried my best. If somebody feels left out, they should ping me, and, they’ll probably appear in the next edition of this book.
It goes without saying that Martin Odersky is to thank for creating the Scala programming language, which was used as a platform for the concurrency frameworks described in this book. Special thanks goes to him, all the people that were part of the Scala team at the EPFL through the last 10 or more years, and the people at Typesafe, who are working hard to keep Scala one of the best general purpose languages out there.
Most of the Scala concurrency frameworks rely on the work of Doug Lea, in one way or another. His Fork/Join framework underlies the implementation of the Akka actors, Scala Parallel Collections, and the Futures and Promises library, and many of the JDK concurrent data structures described in this book are his own implementation. Many of the Scala concurrency libraries were influenced by his advice.
The Scala Futures and Promises library was initially designed by Philipp Haller, Heather Miller, Vojin Jovanović, and me from the EPFL, Viktor Klang and Roland Kuhn from the Akka team, and Marius Eriksen from Twitter, with contributions from Havoc Pennington, Rich Dougherty, Jason Zaugg, Doug Lea, and many others.
Although I was the main author of the Scala Parallel Collections, this library benefited from the input of many different people, including Phil Bagwell, Martin Odersky, Tiark Rompf, Doug Lea, and Nathan Bronson. Later on, Dmitry Petrashko and I started working on an improved version of parallel and standard collection operations, optimized through the use of Scala Macros. Eugene Burmako and Denys Shabalin are one of the main contributors to the Scala Macros project.
The work on the Rx project was started by Erik Meijer, Wes Dyer, and the rest of the Rx team. Since its original .NET implementation, the Rx framework has been ported to many different languages, including Java, Scala, Groovy, JavaScript, and PHP, and has gained widespread adoption thanks to the contributions and the maintenance work of Ben Christensen, Samuel Grütter, Shixiong Zhu, Donna Malayeri, and many other people.
Nathan Bronson is one of the main contributors to the ScalaSTM project, whose default implementation is based on Nathan’s CCSTM project. The ScalaSTM API was designed by the ScalaSTM expert group, composed of Nathan Bronson, Jonas Bonér, Guy Korland, Krishna Sankar, Daniel Spiewak, and Peter Veentjer.
The initial Scala actor library was inspired by the Erlang actor model and developed by Philipp Haller. This library inspired Jonas Bonér to start the Akka actor framework. The Akka project had many contributors, including Viktor Klang, Henrik Engström, Peter Vlugter, Roland Kuhn, Patrik Nordwall, Björn Antonsson, Rich Dougherty, Johannes Rudolph, Mathias Doenitz, Philipp Haller, and many others.
Finally, I would like to thank the entire Scala community for their contributions, and for making Scala an awesome programming language.