Comments on: Scala Review

By: Understanding the Market for Software Platforms « Jeff Vroom’s Blog

Understanding the Market for Software Platforms « Jeff Vroom’s Blog — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:34:35 +0000

[...] the design integrity, flexibility and robustness of the designs. I’ve looked at Ruby, Scala, JavaFX – the three major contenders and found them all to be an unsuitable base from an [...]

By: jeffvroom

jeffvroom — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:52:28 +0000

I haven’t seen either processing or SPDE but both look very interesting. Thanks for the heads up!

By: Mike Garrity

Mike Garrity — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:56:53 +0000

Hi Jeff,
Have you seen SPDE? It’s a Scala version of Processing. I’ve become a big fan of Processing while teaching the kids to program. There are a couple of their projects on my blog.

For more info on SPDE, check out these links:

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/3391
http://technically.us/code
http://www.processing.org/

By: jeffvroom

jeffvroom — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:42:07 +0000

Thanks for the D recommendation. I like a lot of things in there and would like to look at it more closely. The oddest thing though is the default of using thread-private memory by default for allocation. I’m not sure how that would work in practice… if classes and fields need to be marked shared explicitly doesn’t that create two incompatible programming models in one language? Presumably shared objects cannot refer to thread specific ones. I don’t think the programmer should be forced to think about thread specific objects. I admit there are lots of performance benefits if you could put them there.

It also seems like right now it is a competitor to C++ but not Java until “SafeD” is a clean and robust layer you can sit on top of “native D”.

By: Seth Hodgson

Seth Hodgson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:36:16 +0000

Great review of Scala (and of JavaFX more recently). Especially the digging into implementation details (e.g. costs associated with properties/fields/etc.) and relative runtime efficiencies.

Following on to these statements (which I agree with whole-heartedly):
“I’m stuck in C and Java as general purpose languages – C for runtime efficiency and Java for the best mix of runtime, reliability, maintainability.”
…
“Any other languages you think I should be looking at?”

I’d recommend throwing D into the mix Andrei Alexandrescu (of Modern C++ Design fame) recently published an interesting and fairly brief overview of the upcoming version 2 of the language and it would appear to offer many of the advantages of both C and Java in a single package. It’s definitely worth a quick read: http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/217801225?pgno=1

By: James Ward

James Ward — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:05:55 +0000

Thanks Jeff. I can’t wait to read it!

By: jeffvroom

jeffvroom — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:22:45 +0000

Hey James,

Thanks for checking on my blog. I agree they make the easy stuff easy and very concise… it can get kind of complex though – take a look at the compiler code. It was a little humbling for me even though I had read most of the book. The compiler is concise and looks like a simple recursive descent algorithm but I could not trace all of the threads down to find exactly how the low-level primitives were implemented. In contrast, the JavaFX compiler was much easier for me to read even though it is lots of code. BTW, I hope to get the chance to write up my review of JavaFX. You folks from Adobe may find something interesting in that one

Jeff

By: James Ward

James Ward — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:14:09 +0000

Hey Jeff,

Good to see you looking at Scala! I’ve done some stuff integrating Scala and Flex and found it pretty easy and fun.

-James