Scalafix VS ZIO

I also recommend using Scalafix. It's a tool which can lint your codebase, checking for potentially problematic things, like

Scalafix

scala-fix seems relevant for the /= removal problem.

or `NonUnitStatements` without explicit annotation.

This effectively locks you into writing pure code (you can extend the linter to cover other things like not using `Future` or not using Java libs outside of `MonadError` from cats[4]). The linters operate on typed ASTs at compile time, and have plugins for the most popular scala build tools. Coupled with `-XFatalWarnings', you can guarantee that nothing unexpected happens unless you explicitly pop the escape hatch, for the most part.

You can still bring in external libraries that haven't been compiled with these safties in place, so you aren't completely safe, but if you use ZIO[5]/Typelevel[6] libraries you can be reasonably assured of referentially transparent code in practice.

There are three schools of thought, roughly, in the scala community towards the depth of using the type system and linters to provide guarantees and capabilities, currently:

1) Don't attempt to do this, it makes the barrier to entry to high for Scala juniors. I don't understand this argument - you want to allow runtime footguns you could easily prevent at compile time because the verifiable techniques take time to learn? Why did you even choose to use a typesafe language and pay the compilation time penalty that comes with it?

2) Abstract everything to the smallest possible dependency interface, including effects (code to an effect runtime, F[_] that implements the methods your code needs to run - if you handle errors, F implements MonadError, if you output do concurrent things, F implements Concurrent, etc.) and you extend the effect with your own services using tagless final or free.

3) You still use effect wrappers, but you bind the whole project always to use a concrete effect type, avoiding event abstraction, thus making it easier to code, and limiting footguns to a very particular subset (mainly threadpool providers and unsafeRun or equivalent being called eagerly in the internals of applications).

My opinion is that smallest interface with effect guarantees (#2) is best for very large, long maintenance window apps where thechoice of effect runtime might change(app), or is out of the devs' control (lib); and #3 is best for small apps.

TL/DR; You can go a really, really long way to guaranteeing effects don't run in user code in scala. Not all the way like Haskell, but far enough that it's painful to code without conforming to referential transparency.

1. https://github.com/scalacenter/scalafix

2. https://github.com/scalaz/scalazzi

3. http://www.wartremover.org/

4. https://typelevel.org/cats/api/cats/MonadError.html

5. https://zio.dev/

6. https://typelevel.org/

I actually still recommend using WartRemover, at least until there's an equivalent ScalaFix ruleset that's as effective.

Probably linting rules defined in Scalafix. See https://github.com/scalacenter/scalafix/blob/master/scalafix-rules/src/main/scala/scalafix/internal/rule/DisableSyntax.scala#L11 for an example.

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.