pekko VS ZIO

Pekko is open source, has the same API. So there's no problem there.

Understandable considering the size of Pekko and how much time is passed, I would recommend asking any questions/concerns on either the Pekko mailing list https://lists.apache.org/[email protected] or on Github discussions https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/discussions.

Another big reason behind the "struggle" is we have done further improvements. For example the first release of Pekko will support all Scala versions from 2.12 up to 3.3.0 LTS (which was just released a couple of days ago). This also includes Pekko's modules which means we had to either add back in Scala 2.12 support or Scala 3 support. Yet another example would be https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/pull/281 which allowed us to drop scala-java8-compat dependency for Scala 2.13 or higher. So while these improvements aren't technically necessary, they have a large impact on Pekko going forward, i.e. the scala-java8-compat change means that we can drop Scala 2.12 at any point in time without breaking users.

Apache Pekko is the open source fork of Akka. I know they can use more hands right now - https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/issues

There is an option missing: Considering switching to pekko when it's ready: https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko

- In 2022, Lightbend changed the Akka licence, made it proprietary and very expensive at large scale

Software that starts out as more "pure", non-corporate open-source can still turn the tables on you and charge large licensing fees later. But at least if it's open source from the start, it can be forked, e.g. for Akka, there's this Apache fork that was started after Akka changed its licence: https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko . This is the key open source protection, and it's true for both corporate and non-corporate projects.

scala has 2 healthy and pretty complete lib ecosystems : check out typelevel and ZIO. Both are FP oriented, which might not be your cup of tea at first glance but I would encourage you to try em out ! Softest introduction would be to start with the typelevel cats library and build up from there. The excellent Scala with Cats will ease you softly into an FP mindset. It's a bit dated and for scala 2 only but translating to Scala 3 is a very good exercise if you feel so inclined !

Last but not least, Scala is currently the language with one of the best effect systems in my opinion (https://zio.dev/). Kotlin for example has copied the approach with https://arrow-kt.io/ which I think is great actually. But when comparing Scala and Kotlin here, Scala wins by a large margin, it is a completely different world. It's like building a highly concurrent system in Erlang vs C.

Of course, if you don't want to learn things like union types, traits/typeclasses and effects (similar to async/await but more powerful) you will be annoyed by Scala. But once you learned them, you can never go back.

ZIO

Links: - https://dotty.epfl.ch/ - https://scala-native.org/en/stable/ - https://www.scala-js.org/ - https://typelevel.org/ - https://zio.dev/ - https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/pull/3120 - https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/pull/16517 - https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/index.html - https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/ - https://scalameta.org/metals/ - https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/guides/migration/compatibility-intro.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2023/04/18/faster-scalajs-development-with-frontend-tooling.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/08/17/long-term-compatibility-plans.html

For the Rx approach, The ZIO framework for Scala has a streaming API that can meet those sorts of requirements. e.g.

This tutorial will introduce how to build from scratch, a REST microservice using the ZIO framework, and examples of ZIO dependency injection, ZIO HTTP, JSON, JDBC, and others from the ZIO environment. The source code is available here

I use ZIO (http://zio.dev) for Scala which makes parallel programming trivial.

Wraps different styles of asynchronicity e.g. callbacks, futures, fibers into one coherent model. And has excellent resource management so you can be sure that when you are forking a task that it will always clean up after itself.

Have yet to see anything that comes close whilst still being practical i.e. you can leverage the very large ecosystem of Java libraries.

The one advantage Rust has over Scala is that it detects data races at compile time, and that's a big time saver if you use low level thread synchronization. However, if you write pure FP code with ZIO or Cats Effect that's basically a non-issue anyway.