Large-scale concurrency and asynchronous event streams are at the center of an increasing number of software systems in a variety of domains, such as media delivery, online retail, and data analytics. The principles and building blocks for the composition of such systems are the object of the emerging discipline of reactive programming. With its support for the actor model of concurrency, the Scala programming language early on provided reactive programming abstractions as part of its standard library. Today, Scala powers numerous large-scale reactive systems on the Java Virtual Machine.
Beginning with an overview of Scala's core concurrency support, this talk will give an overview of reactive programming in Scala, and its vibrant open-source ecosystem. Finally, I will discuss a selection of open challenges, and ongoing efforts aiming to address them.
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Philipp Haller
is an Assistant Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden's leading technical university. He is co-author of Scala's async/await extension for asynchronous programming, and one of the lead designers of Scala's futures library. As main author of the book "Actors in Scala," he created Scala's first widely-used implementation of actors. More recently, he led a research project on Akka for Scala.js. Previously, he held positions at Typesafe, Stanford University, and EPFL. He received a PhD in computer science from EPFL.