Ox, an experimental concurrency library using Project Loom and Scala 3, offers features such as developer-friendly structured concurrency, scoped values, and implementation of Go-like channels. Channels have been introduced some time ago, along with higher-level combinators, allowing working with streams in both functional and imperative styles, depending on the use…

Project Loom introduces the concept of Virtual Threads to Java’s runtime and will be available as a stable feature in JDK 21 in September. Project Loom aims to combine the performance benefits of asynchronous programming with the simplicity of a direct, “synchronous” programming style. To achieve the performance goals, any…

Futures and promises have made their way into most of the mainstream languages. We intuitively know what a future represents, but what’s the precise definition? Are the concepts and mechanics behind futures/promises always the same, or are there some differences? Let’s reach out to Wikipedia for a start; Wikipedia articles…

HTTP is one of the primary ways of exposing applications to the outside world and communicating microservices within a system. Almost every backend service, at some point, performs an HTTP request. However, in certain situations, we are no longer interested in the results of an HTTP call. This might be…

Java 19 brought a preview of virtual threads and an API for structural concurrency. Java 20 extends this with ScopedValues, a much-improved version of ThreadLocal s. When writing concurrent code in Java, the first option is to work directly with threads (virtual or not). However, this is usually not the…

In the previous installments of the “Trying out Unison” series, we’ve first explored its core feature, content-addressed code, thanks to which a function’s identity is determined by what it does, not by its name (names are just labels). Then, we’ve examined how this impacts how you might organize your code…

While uncertainty surrounds Twitter, people are looking into alternative microblogging platforms. One such application is gaining a lot of popularity, Mastodon. The concept is similar to Twitter: we can post toots (short messages), which are visible to our followers; we can boost (retweet) posts or favorite (like) them. However, there…

Java 19 contains a preview of the core component of Project Loom: virtual threads. We can now create threads at will, as we’re no longer (or at least, much less) constrained by their costs in terms of memory and context switch time. Where there are threads, there’s concurrency. So what…

In the previous articles on Unison, we’ve introduced Unison’s “big idea”: content-addressed code and explored how this impacts code organisation and dependency management. But that’s not everything that Unison has to offer. Its effect system is equally interesting and worth exploring in detail. Effect systems aim to add some structure…