How to Avoid Safety Hazards when using Closures in Scala

Please log in to watch this conference skillscast.

Closures, or lambda expressions, are an essential language feature to work productively with popular data processing engines like Apache Spark and Flink, and they enable functional programming (FP), a style of programming that is gaining popularity for composable programming with effects, among others. However, more and more use cases in parallel and distributed programming are testing the limits of the flexibility of closures. For example, the requirement for closures to be serializable is a common source of errors when developing data processing or streaming applications. In a concurrent setting, for example, when programming with futures and promises, closures must be used with great care in order to prevent safety hazards like race conditions. In this talk you will learn how to spot potentially unsafe code using closures, how to write safer closure-using code, and how to use newly developed library components to increase the flexibility and safety of closures in Scala.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

• Simplifying Asynchronous Code with Scala Async (SkillsCast recorded in June 2013)
• Teaching Haskell...To High Schoolers! (SkillsCast recorded in December 2022)
• Teaching Haskell...To High Schoolers! (SkillsCast recorded in December 2022)