requests-scala VS pekko

There's the Li Haoyi's ecosystem of tools and libraries that's fun to hack on, has a low entry-bar (with a design philosophy of using the least complex abstractions for the job), and has few libs like requests and cask that may appeal to those liking some python minimalism. That's not the fastest way to learn hardcore FP, that's not the worst either.

Another thing that caught my attention is the choice for HTTP client. If the authors wanted to go with the simplest thing, they could have picked requests-scala (from the com-lihaoyi family of libraries). If they wanted to go with full blown Scala FP, they could have chosen http4s client (Ember). Sttp awkwardly sits in the middle being neither.

Finally, to give you an example of how simple Scala can be when you get rid of all the fancy stuff, take a look at the examples in Li Haoyi's requests-scala library, a port of the excellent requests Python library. I challenge anyone to call that code complex.

http4s (either with Blaze or Ember) is great, but you may need to think a bit about what you're doing. Maybe https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/requests-scala will be the best choice for your particular situation?

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.