Functional Roundup for July 8, 2016

by Maureen Elsberry
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July 08, 2016
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news• scala• akka• typelevel• functional roundup
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4 minutes to read.

sbt 0.13.12-RC1 released

sbt 0.13.12-RCs was released on June 30th, and pending no issues, will become the final version on July 15th.

Eugene Yokota lists the following as highlights in 0.13.12-RC1:

2634 A dependency manager enhancement that consistently applies scalaVersion and scalaOrganization settings to Scala tool chain artifacts. Contributed by @milessabin.
2569 Fixes a regression from sbt 0.13.11 that was hitting Maven Central even with the repository override. Contributed by Yokota.
2642 Fixes merged descriptors dropping configuration specification. Contributed by Yokota.

0.13.12-RC1 is binary and source compatible with 0.12.{x

x<12}.

You can view more of the release notes here: sbt 0.13.12-RC1.

Akka 2.4.8 released

The Akka team announced the latest patch release on Friday, July, 8th.

They highlight the following changes:

20690 HTTP Connection pools don’t cache a resolved DNS address anymore.
20456 HTTP Connection Pools can be configured to keep a “hot” number of connections open eagerly, to decrease first-request-on-pool latency significantly.
20469 Ported “Handling Blocking operations” document from an excellent StackOverflow answer.
18399 Distributed Data now takes advantage of the WeaklyUp state.

The latest release was thanks to the contributions of 40 committers.

They also relaunched the Akka team blog this week. Read up on Threading & Concurrency in Akka Streams Explained (Part I)

You can view the full list of changes here: Akka 2.4.8 released

Scala Exercises V.2 Released

Scala Exercises, an Open Source project from 47 Degrees, was officially released on Wednesday, July 6th. The free community tool allows users to learn Scala and it’s associated toolsets directly in their browser on any device.

The project features exercises for the following libraries:

stdlib - Scala fuses object-oriented and functional programming in a statically typed programming language.
cats - an experimental library intended to provide abstractions for functional programming in Scala.
shapeless - a type class and dependent type based generic programming library for Scala.

Exercises for Fetch, Doobie, Circe, ScalaCheck, and the Functional Programming in Scala book are currently in the works!

You can read more about this release here: Scala Exercises V.2 released

In addition, check out the following releases and information:

Read up on the latest blog post by Lukas Rytz over at Scala-lang: Performance of using default methods to compile Scala trait methods. Make sure you’re sitting down because it’s a lengthy look at some irregularities causing a 20% slowdown of the Scala compiler and is worth the read.

Suggested information to digest this weekend:

The functional programming community has no shortage of excellent conferences and talks. Here are just a few that were recently released that we recommend checking out if you missed them the first time:

Lars Hupel & Viktor Kuncak:

Translating Scala Programs to Isabelle/HOL
IJCAR 2016 - Coimbra, Portugal

Lars Hupel and Viktor Kuncak present, “a trustworthy connection between the Leon verification system and the Isabelle proof assistant. Leon is a system for verifying functional Scala programs. It uses a variety of automated theorem provers (ATPs) to check verification conditions (VCs) stemming from the input program. This process is completely automatic: no user intervention is required for proving these conditions. Isabelle, on the other hand, is an interactive theorem prover used to verify mathematical specifications using its own input language Isabelle/Isar. Users specify (inductive) definitions and write proofs about them manually, albeit with the help of semi-automated tactics. The integration of these two system allows us to exploit Isabelle’s rich standard library and give greater confidence guarantees in the correctness of analysed programs.”

View the slides here:

MoonConf 2016 Presentations: