Functional Roundup for April 15, 2016
by Maureen Elsberry
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- April 15, 2016
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- news• scala• functional roundup
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- 3 minutes to read.

Release of Scala 2.12.0-M4
On April 11th, Scala 2.12.0-M4 was made available to the public marking feature completeness for 2.12.
M4 includes new features such as the ability to compile a trait to a single interface, Java 8-style Lambdas which can lead to significantly smaller JAR files, a new backend “GenBCode” which emits code more quickly, and a new bytecode optimizer.
Scala.lang reports that in total, 135 pull requests were merged, 16 by new contributors, and 49 JIRA tickets were resolved. You can take a look at 14 of the most significant PR’s here.
There are a few breaking changes that should be reviewed and it should be noted that Scala 2.12 is not binary compatible with the 2.11.x series.
Head over to Scala-lang.org for more information about this release: Scala 2.12.0-M4 Is Now Available
Lightbend acquires consulting firm BoldRadius
Earlier today, Lightbend, the company behind the Reactive Platform, announced that they have agreed to acquire the consulting firm BoldRadius Solutions and all of their current employees.
“The digital business boom is creating an overwhelming demand from traditional enterprises and global system integrators for Reactive technologies and expertise,” said Mark Brewer, CEO at Lightbend. “The acquisition of BoldRadius allows Lightbend to meet this demand with a well-formed team with real-world experience enabling Lightbend customers and partners.”
Brewer further explains, “Acquisition is an obvious tactic to expand our reach, but is only truly beneficial if the values of both sides are deeply aligned.”
The acquisition should be finalized over the next few weeks.
Read the official announcement here: Lightbend Announces Acquisition of BoldRadius as Demand for Reactive Systems Grows
Akka 2.4.4 Released
Due to a few “annoying bugs” in 2.4.3, the Akka team has expedited the release of Akka 2.4.4.
Here are the important fixes according Akka:
- Enable streaming responses with ‘Connection: close’, issue #20254
- NPE in ConsistentHashingRouter for SimpleDnsManager, issue #20263
- Streams wiring should work in arbitrary nest levels far from original module, issue #20216
- Fixed dangerous sharing of state in HTTP’s connection management issues #20228 #20080
- Fix and enable Server Name Indication configuration via ssl-config, issue #20214
The update closed a total of 33 issues with the help of 18 committers.
You can view more about the latest release here: Akka 2.4.4 Released!
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 released this week that we recommend checking out if you missed them the first time:
Heather Miller:
- Academese to English: A Practical Tour of Scala’s Type System
- Philly ETE
Heather Miller provides an example-rich tour of Scala’s type system and it’s practical uses. See how it can be used to improve usability by reducing boilerplate and keeping code type-safe.
View the slidedeck here: Academese to English: A Practical Tour of Scala’s Type System
Jonas Bonér:
- Bla Bla microservices bla bla
- O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference
Jonas Bonér looks at microservices from the perspective of first principles, distilling it to its essence and putting it within the context of distributed systems.
View the keynote presentation here: Bla bla microservices bla bla
Typelevel.Summit Philadelphia presentations:
Typelevel has now made the video presentations from the Typelevel Summit in Philadelphia available for viewing on their YouTube channel.
The talks are being released a few at a time so subscribe to their channel to get updated when new content is added. Definitely keep an eye out for Raul Raja’s talk on what to expect with the upcoming Scala exercise V.2 from 47 Degrees.
Currently uploaded talks can be found here: Typelevel.Summit Philadelphia
Have a news tip for us? Tweet to us @47deg or send to us via email here.