Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Nov 21, 2022The architecture of MastodonWhile 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…Mastodon8 min readMastodon8 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Oct 27, 2022Protecting state using virtual threadsJava 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…Java9 min readJava9 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Oct 19, 2022Trying out Unison, part 3: effects through abilities | SoftwareMillIn 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…Functional Programming9 min readFunctional Programming9 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Oct 6, 2022Trying out Unison, part 2: organising codeDependency hell, package managers, publishing, supply chain attacks-these are just a few of the problems that might be solved by Unison! Let’s see how. In the first part of the series surrounding Unison, we’ve covered the “big idea” behind it: content-address code. …Functional Programming8 min readFunctional Programming8 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Sep 30, 2022A tapir looms in the distance | SoftwareMillThe moment Java and JVM developers have long been waiting for came last week: Java 19 has been released. Among other changes (also significant!), the release includes a preview of VirtualThreads, which are part of project Loom. We’ve been discussing Loom on this blog a couple ⧉ of ⧉ times…Scala3 min readScala3 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Sep 21, 2022Migrating from Akka HTTP to tapirIn the light of the recent announcement by Lightbend that the entire Akka stack is going to be relicensed from an open-source licence to a source-available one, I’m sure many development teams are assessing their options and considering next steps. Akka was used in a number of situations, ranging from…Scala8 min readScala8 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Sep 5, 2022Trying out Unison, part 1: code as hashesUnison is an upcoming language & distributed runtime. It’s functional, statically typed, and introduces some really interesting ideas, which make Unison different from “mainstream” languages. If you’re into Scala, you might have heard of Paul Chiusano and Rúnar Bjarnason, the co-founders of Unison Computing (a public benefit organisation). …Functional Programming6 min readFunctional Programming6 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Aug 30, 2022Implementing Raft using Project LoomIn the previous article, we’ve examined in detail the implementation of Raft using a functional effect system. …Java19 min readJava19 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Aug 18, 2022Implementing Raft using a functional effect systemOne of the areas where functional effect systems are said to excel is concurrent programming. This looks great on paper, but is it true in practice? Let’s find out! What could be a better case study for concurrent programming than implementing the Raft consensus algorithm? …Scala29 min readScala29 min read
Published in SoftwareMill Tech Blog·Jul 28, 2022The future of effects in Scala?Recently Jack Viers and Raul Raja from 47 Degrees posted a pre-SIP proposal to add Kotlin-like suspend functions to Scala. …Scala12 min readScala12 min read
