ZIO VS cats-effect

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

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.

> It's a weakness of functional programming, not the language.

I would strongly object this.

Have you seen ZIO?

https://zio.dev/

But overall, I'm happier with Scala. It has not one, but two lively FP communities. I recommend that you pick one of them: ZIO or TypeLevel (Cats Effect, fs2, http4s, ...). To some extent, you can mix TypeLevel libraries in ZIO projects.

I think "better Haskell on JVM" (in contrast to "worse Haskell") is a good identity for Scala to have. (Please note that this is an intentional hyperbole.)

Of course, there are areas where Haskell is stronger than Scala (hint: modularity, crucial for good Software Engineering, is not one of them). And Scala has its own way of doing things, so just imitating Haskell won't work well.

Examples of this "better Haskell" are https://typelevel.org/cats-effect/ and https://zio.dev/ .

All together, Scala may be a better choice for you if you want to do Pure Functional Programming. And is definitely less risky (runs on JVM, Java libraries interop, IntelliJ, easy debugging, etc...).

None of the other languages you mentioned are viable in this sense (if also you want a powerful type system, which rules out Clojure).

I agree that Rust's identity is pretty clear: a modern language for use cases where only C or C++ could have been used before.

Those benchmarks are using a snapshot version of cats-effect. I don't know where that one comes from, but previously they were using a snapshot from https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/pull/3332 which had some issues (3.5-6581dc4, 70% performance degradation), which have since been resolved (see that PR for more info and comparative benchmarks).

Recently, CE3 has had similar issues reported across multiple repositories, almost an epidemic of reports!

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.

See also cats-effect and fs2. cats-effect gives you your IO Monad (and IOApp to run it with on supported platforms). fs2 is the ecosystem’s streaming library, which is much more pervasive in functional Scala than in Haskell. For example, http4s and Doobie are both based on fs2.

On the contrary, switching to the functional mindset, with something like Typelevel Scala3 and respective cats and cats-effect fs2 frameworks, helps to rethink a lot of designs and development approaches.

I think "better Haskell on JVM" (in contrast to "worse Haskell") is a good identity for Scala to have. (Please note that this is an intentional hyperbole.)

Of course, there are areas where Haskell is stronger than Scala (hint: modularity, crucial for good Software Engineering, is not one of them). And Scala has its own way of doing things, so just imitating Haskell won't work well.

Examples of this "better Haskell" are https://typelevel.org/cats-effect/ and https://zio.dev/ .

All together, Scala may be a better choice for you if you want to do Pure Functional Programming. And is definitely less risky (runs on JVM, Java libraries interop, IntelliJ, easy debugging, etc...).

None of the other languages you mentioned are viable in this sense (if also you want a powerful type system, which rules out Clojure).

I agree that Rust's identity is pretty clear: a modern language for use cases where only C or C++ could have been used before.

I would use Scala. I like FP and Scala comes with some awesome libraries for concurrent/async programming like Cats Effect or ZIO. Good choice for creating modern style micro-services to be run in the cloud (or even macro-services, Scala has a powerful module system, so it's made to handle large codebases).

https://typelevel.org/cats-effect/

https://zio.dev/

The language, the community and customs are great. You don't have to worry about nulls, things are immutable by default, domain modelling with ADTs and patter matching is pure joy.

The tooling available is from good to great and Scala is big enough that there are good libraries for typical if not vast majority of stuff and Java libs as a reliable fallback.

The author is the creator of Monix and implemented the first version of cats-effect. He knows what he is doing.

You want Kernmantle, which quite honestly shouldn't be hard to implement around Cats and cats-effect. In particular, although Kernmantle doesn't require the use of the Arrow typeclass, there happen to be Arrow (actually ArrowChoice) instances for both Function1 from the standard library and Kleisli from Cats itself, given a Monad instance for the Kleilsi's F[_] type parameter. In other words, we should be able to port Kernmantle from Haskell to Scala (with the Typelevel ecosystem) and instantly be able to use pretty much anything else from the Typelevel ecosystem, or wrapped with it, in our workflow graphs. Pure functions, monadic functions, applicative functions, GADTs with hand-written interpreters, any of it. I think this would be eminently worth doing.