Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

blog.pierre-ricadat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 124 posts

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#71

Post by lyall »

whoodle wrote: post #70

I currently work at a company who is primarily writing in Scala. I really like Scala but assume my next role won’t be in that. Are my two best options Rust and Java if I want to keep some of the typing, functional style, and pattern matching while also moving to a more popular language?

Kotlin is gaining steam in the Java world. We're moving to make it our default server-side language at my company instead of Java. Given its great Java interop, you can basically think of it as a modern, more functional Java that doesn't have multiple decades of baggage associated with it. I highly recommend considering it in any place you'd consider Java.

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#72

Post by rr808 »

Currently work on a Scala/Spark project as part of our work. Everyone hates it except the one guy who knows it well, but for most people who spend most of their time doing imperative languages its just too much of a mind jump. Hopefully soon we'll be on a new big data platform soon and we wont have to deal with a migration like this.

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#73

Post by jeremyjh »

senorrib wrote: post #67
jeremyjh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still seems bizarre to me that the Java ecosystem relies upon code-sharing through precompiled binary packages. Compared to for example Rust or Elixir where you only download source and build it locally so that everything is built with the same compiler and environment. This makes it absolutely trivial to debug your dependencies and even fork them when necessary. Most Java programmers wouldn't ever dream of doing…

That's actually a major drawback on Rust to be adopted in enterprise settings. Any GPL library statically compiled would force the entire codebase to be licensed under GPL as well.

GPL can contaminate you when shared as a dynamic library under certain circumstances. But that doesn't matter, since there are few mainstream libraries in these communities licensed as GPL. Nearly all of it is MIT or Apache.

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#74

Post by rendaw »

philipkglass wrote: post #2

This is a good report. I started a project last year on Scala 2.13, but had all Scala 3 compatibility features/warnings enabled from the beginning. It sounds like it should be an easy upgrade in the future as long as I don't rely on macros or libraries that rely on macros. I've tried to stick to libraries that already have Scala 3 releases or that come from plain Java.

Is it recommended to start with Scala 2 instead of 3 right now?

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#75

Post by colonial »

whoodle wrote: post #70

I currently work at a company who is primarily writing in Scala. I really like Scala but assume my next role won’t be in that. Are my two best options Rust and Java if I want to keep some of the typing, functional style, and pattern matching while also moving to a more popular language?

Seconding the sibling comment re: Kotlin. I haven't worked much with it personally, but I've heard from plenty of people that it strikes a good balance between Java being... Java and Scala's floundering.

Rust also checks your feature boxes, but staying in the JVM-verse is almost certainly the safer bet unless you end up really needing fast native binaries that aren't a chore to code.

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#76

Post by spockz »

lyall wrote: post #71
whoodle wrote: post #70

I currently work at a company who is primarily writing in Scala. I really like Scala but assume my next role won’t be in that. Are my two best options Rust and Java if I want to keep some of the typing, functional style, and pattern matching while also moving to a more popular language?

Kotlin is gaining steam in the Java world. We're moving to make it our default server-side language at my company instead of Java. Given its great Java interop, you can basically think of it as a modern, more functional Java that doesn't have multiple decades of baggage associated with it. I highly recommend considering it in any place you'd consider Java.

Now that Java has caught up a lot with records, value classes, project loom (virtual/green threads), pattern matching. What is left?

Scala has the better type system with union types and effects (a more generic way of having “throws”.)

Kotlin has a nicer way of dealing with optional values with the ? operator.

What’s left is the syntax. Or am I missing something? These alone do not seem to justify moving an organisation.

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#77

Post by joshlemer »

hocuspocus wrote: post #60
lmm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like the biggest misstep that the Scala ecosystem and Typesafe/Lightbend did was that they didn't invest more in Play Framework. 10 or 12 years ago, Play had a lot of energy and momentum, and it's a kind of thing that has broad enterprise/start up appeal. But focus was always more on Akka and what seemed like really niche architecture astronaut stuff like Actors and Actor System Clusters and Event Sourcing e…

That is correct. Play's hype did more harm than good. I work at a company that has many legacy projects in Scala because we were/are heavily invested in Spark, and Play is a disaster overall.

What is so bad specifically about play?

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#78

Post by spockz »

As I mentioned deeper in the thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42969519, Java seems to have caught up with Kotlin and Scala language wise. (With Scala3 having the most extensive type system.)

The ecosystem also seems to have petered out. Akka, spark, and flink used to be reasons to do scala. But they have decent java interfaces now.

I’ve had too much struggles convincing colleagues that actually more information in the type is convenient. It seems like the same religion of untyped vs typed.

What is left as reasons to choose for scala or Kotlin?

Re: Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field

#79

Post by rat87 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #23
theLiminator wrote: post #18

Back when I used to use Scala, the biggest PITA was how every minor version bump you'd run into binary version incompatibilities that you'd only run into at runtime. Has that situation changed? I've always felt that Scala the language was always pretty nice, but Scala the ecosystem/tooling was moderately painful to work with. It was getting better over time, but they lost all the momentum they had.

It still seems bizarre to me that the Java ecosystem relies upon code-sharing through precompiled binary packages. Compared to for example Rust or Elixir where you only download source and build it locally so that everything is built with the same compiler and environment. This makes it absolutely trivial to debug your dependencies and even fork them when necessary. Most Java programmers wouldn't ever dream of doing…

Why? It makes a ton of sense. Its been a while but I'm pretty sure decompilation leads to much higher level/understandable code in java/c#. Good enough to step into and debug libraries.

And given how fragile/unreproducible it is you almost never want to modify lines in a dependency. In python I'd make a wrapper or monkey patch it instead of modifying the dependency(Or if you need to actually for the library and add it to the dependenies). Unless it was blocking a one of task that I needed done right away.

Post reply on HN