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Right. Those are questions/concerns. In terms of what I think is going for it: There's a nice IDE from JetBrains and Eclipse support is good. The REPL/worksh

by YZF 13y ago

Right. Those are questions/concerns. In terms of what I think is going for it: There's a nice IDE from JetBrains and Eclipse support is good. The REPL/worksheets. It does perform well on the JVM and running on the JVM means it's portable and you can also leverage a lot of the Java eco-system. It seems that where performance really matters a lot of companies do choose to "drop down" to C or C++. I think there's still a gap vs. the JVM. I guess I still need to be "sold" on it hence all the questions. It does seem to work for Twitter as far a large application and scale but I was hoping to get a little inside information on that. I thought what differentiated Twitter is how comitted they are to the language and the scale it's used so it seems there's a lot to learn from their story beyond what's in the presentation.

noelwelsh 13y ago
In a large system like Twitter you're not going to micro-optimise every line of code. You want a good performance baseline and the ability of quickly write correct code. For many Scala and the JVM is a better tradeoff than C or C++ in this regard. See Martin Thompson's blog if you want to know more about low-level performance optimisation on the JVM. You're also overlooking the benefit of a modern type system. If you haven't used one before it's difficult to appreciate what they bring. Twitter's Summingbird project is a great example of how a few powerful abstractions, enabled by Scala's type system, can simplify a very complex problem. What I like about Scala and the JVM is they have a large expressive width (http://noelwelsh.com/programming/2013/07/10/expressive-width/ http://noelwelsh.com/programming/2013/07/10/expressive-width...). I can write very terse, expressive code when productivity is the main focus, but also reach down to grub around with low-level code if I need to squeeze out performance. Very few platforms offer this.

by YZF 13y ago

noelwelsh 13y ago

In a large system like Twitter you're not going to micro-optimise every line of code. You want a good performance baseline and the ability of quickly write correct code. For many Scala and the JVM is a better tradeoff than C or C++ in this regard. See Martin Thompson's blog if you want to know more about low-level performance optimisation on the JVM. You're also overlooking the benefit of a modern type system. If you haven't used one before it's difficult to appreciate what they bring. Twitter's Summingbird project is a great example of how a few powerful abstractions, enabled by Scala's type system, can simplify a very complex problem. What I like about Scala and the JVM is they have a large expressive width (http://noelwelsh.com/programming/2013/07/10/expressive-width/ http://noelwelsh.com/programming/2013/07/10/expressive-width...). I can write very terse, expressive code when productivity is the main focus, but also reach down to grub around with low-level code if I need to squeeze out performance. Very few platforms offer this.