Session Description

Scala was always meant to be simple, safe, and robust. It was designed to “scale” from short programs to big, efficient solutions. Features like higher-kinded types, the for-comprehension syntactic sugar, and Futures enabled efficient concurrency. Along the way, Scala’s sophisticated type system enabled the development of functional programming ecosystems around IO monads. This introduced principles such as referential transparency for scalability and fearless refactoring. But there was a price to pay: a steep learning curve and a reputation for complexity. These factors discourage new developers.

Today, we have a solution and a way to attract new developers to Scala. The VirtusLab Scala Stack is a complete stack that combines established Scala libraries with some innovation from new ones, focusing on simple Scala through direct style. VirtusLab provides enterprise-grade support for libraries, tools, and the language itself.​

Thanks to VirtusLab Scala Stack, programmers can forget about abusing for-comprehension. Eager Futures and lazy IO monads no longer creep throughout the codebase. Developers can use the style familiar from other languages and ecosystems. This approach is supported by a strong type system together with resource safety. Could this be a new opening for Scala application development?​

During the talk, I will walk you through examples of using different libraries from the VirtusLab Scala Stack family, showcasing what they look like in direct style and how they combine, resulting in simple-to-write and read yet robust and powerful code.