Martin Odersky DIRECT STYLE SCALA Scalar Conference 2023

Martin Odersky discusses the future of direct-style concurrency, IO, and delimited continuations in Scala, enabled by virtual threads.

We have all gotten used to monads as the way to address asynchronous computation and reactive programming. This was certainly a technique of choice on the JVM as long as it lacked a fine grained fiber abstraction. But this is about to change. First, project Loom will offer some fibers in the form of virtual threads. Second, we now know a range of techniques to implement continuations efficiently. So the day might not be far where we can assume continuations or fibers on all platforms where Scala is running. But what will we do with the new abstractions? In my talk I'd like to take you on a tour of what that future could look like. Starting with the recently added boundary/break for error handling, we'll see strawman abstractions for suspensions and their applications. In particular, we'll see an outline of a potential future direct style concurrency and IO library with direct-style futures and channels as main abstractions. These are in turn instances of asynchronous sources, which provide a flexible yet simple way of composing computations. scalar-conf.com/ Scalar Conference 2023 powered by SoftwareMill #scalarconf