gvolpe

// This is the traditional encoding, using abstract type members
// to encode existentials
object AbstractExistentials {
  trait E {
    type X
    val x: X
    def f(p: X): String
  }
   

gvolpe

Explaining Miles's Magic

Miles Sabin recently opened a pull request fixing the infamous SI-2712. First off, this is remarkable and, if merged, will make everyone's life enormously easier. This is a bug that a lot of people hit often without even realizing it, and they just assume that either they did something wrong or the compiler is broken in some weird way. It is especially common for users of scalaz or cats.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. What I want to write about is the exact semantics of Miles's fix, because it does impose some very specific assumptions about the way that type constructors work, and understanding those assumptions is the key to getting the most of it his fix.

For starters, here is the sort of thing that SI-2712 affects:

def foo[F[_], A](fa: F[A]): String = fa.toString

gvolpe

Revisiting Tagless Final Interpreters

Tageless Final interpreters are an alternative to the traditional Algebraic Data Type (and generalized ADT) based implementation of the interpreter pattern. This document presents the Tageless Final approach with Scala, and shows how Dotty with it's recently added implicits functions makes the approach even more appealing. All examples are direct translations of their Haskell version presented in the Typed Tagless Final Interpreters: Lecture Notes (section 2).

The interpreter pattern has recently received a lot of attention in the Scala community. A lot of efforts have been invested in trying to address the biggest shortcomings of ADT/GADT based solutions: extensibility. One can first look at cats' Inject typeclass for an implementation of [Data Type à la Carte](http://www.cs.ru.nl/~W.Swierstra/Publications/DataTypesA

gvolpe

cats-effect

The cats-effect project defines a purely functional effect type (IO[A]), and associated typeclasses defining its behaviour. The ones we care about for this example are:

trait Sync[F[_]] extends MonadError[F, Throwable] {
   def delay[A](a: => A): F[A]
   ...
}

gvolpe

Thread Pools

Thread pools on the JVM should usually be divided into the following three categories:

1. CPU-bound
2. Blocking IO
3. Non-blocking IO polling

Each of these categories has a different optimal configuration and usage pattern.