ZIO VS Http4s

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.

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.

I actually think Scala is in the best position it's ever been.

There is a commitment to making the language simpler, easier and cleaner.

On the backend, ZIO [1] is the best concurrency library on any platform. On the frontend you have really interesting Scala.js projects like Laminar [2].

The biggest issue really is the tooling. SBT is simply awful.

[1] https://zio.dev

Scala? With some help from additional libs such as Zio (https://zio.dev/) it allows you to write production quality programs like you would in Haskell on top of the JVM quite quickly...

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.

Most important/known: * https://http4s.org/ - an HTTP client/server * https://github.com/typelevel/fs2 - streaming * https://github.com/tpolecat/doobie - JDBC

Scala devs are too busy wondering about free monads and F[Request[F] => Response[F]]. I am very pleased by http4s, Doobie, ScalaJS, and the whole ecosystem, really: https://http4s.org

In reality, your performance issues will not be http4s, but something else. That being said, there are improvements that http4s can and is making, and I'm quite excited about the future 1.0 release, which has some important and fundamental performance improvements already, like a a 125% performance improvement on the plaintext benchmark from https://github.com/http4s/http4s/pull/6091 - and finally, yes, akka-http does have very good performance, but you can also get good performance out of http4s.

http4s for REST services.

This is a long list of misunderstandings I don’t have the patience to unpack. Instead, let me refer you to the links in my top comment in the thread, then suggest you learn at least http4s, a purely-functional web service library that’s been used in production for a decade or so now.

I would say http4s and Doobie. Both are pure FP libraries in the Typelevel ecosystem. Both are exceptionally clear, extremely reliable, extremely pleasant to use… I like to point out http4s, in particular, is primarily a collection of types modeling the relevant RFCs. What behavior it has comes overwhelmingly from the underlying Cats, cats-effect, and fs2 libraries. This reflects the generality of those underlying libraries and the intense focus of the http4s team. The same applies to Rob Norris and Doobie, which tames JDBC as well as it can be tamed, IMO.

The most popular nowadays are - I guess - akka-http and http4s. You can also use Play if you don't want to start from scratch but prefer a framework-based approach.

If you want something more powerful, pure-functional and you need to do complex, concurrency-heavy operations, have a look at http4s: https://http4s.org/

I don't think this is toxic but still, it doesn't sit well with me: https://github.com/http4s/http4s/issues/4718