Functional Roundup for August 23, 2017

by Maureen Elsberry
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August 23, 2017
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functional roundup• scala
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4 minutes to read.

Here are some of the latest updates, projects, talks, articles, and events in the Functional Programming community:

On August 17th, Twitter announced a new experimental project aimed at faster compilation times.

Reasonable Scala Compiler (RSC) is being developed by Eugene Burmako and his team.

According to the project’s GitHub page, they have the following goals:

Dramatically improve Scala compilation performance
Study compilation time overhead of various Scala features
Identify a subset of Scala that can be compiled with reasonable speed
Facilitate knowledge transfer to other Scala compilers

RSC also has the following non-goals:

Full backward compatibility (consider Lightbend Scala instead)
New language features (consider Dotty and Typelevel Scala instead)
Improvements to the type system (Dotty/Typelevel Scala)
Runtime performance (will be addressed independently)

The team hopes to speedup compilation speeds by 5-10x and says they’re on the right track to hit this mark. They also say that RSC will be open sourced shortly.

To find out more about this project and how they’re achieving their goals, visit: Reasonable Scala Compiler.

Scio, a Scala API for Beam and Google Cloud Dataflow by Spotify, released version 0.4.0 on August 22nd.

According to the changelog, the release features a handful of new features and bugfixes, including:

#759 - Add option to set BigQuery priority
#776 - Adds safeFlatMap
#771 - Adds Parquet Avro read support
#787 - Support custom number of shards in TFRecord output
#758 - Check isCacheEnabled in BigQueryClient
#774 - Fix AvroType schema namespace

You can view the complete list of changes here: scio v0.4.0 released.

Our partner Databricks sure is having a good week. On August 22nd, they announced they secured $140 million in funding geared at expanding their Unified Analytics Platform. This $$$$ comes from a Series D funding round which was led by Andreessen Horowitz.

According to the announcement, Databricks plans to spend the funding as follows:

Increase product investment in its Unified Analytics Platform, which accelerates innovation by unifying data science, data engineering and business;
Accelerate its global growth strategy;
Expand its markets through industry-specific solutions for a range of industries including Healthcare & Life Sciences, Financial Services, Government, and Media & Entertainment, and;
Grow its engineering and customer success teams that deliver world-class Spark expertise and global support for Databricks’ leading Spark-based cloud platform.

The company hopes that by expanding the Unified Analytics Platform, it will eliminate many hurdles that companies face including cost and complexity, and make both data science and artificial intelligence accessible to both enterprise and midmarket organizations.

You can read the press release here: Databricks Secures $140 Million.

Additional great content and news:

A note on Kentucky Mule and Twitter’s Scala compiler announcement via Grzegorz Kossakowski

Fetch v.0.6.3 released via 47 Degrees
Branding an Open Source project: An in-depth retrospective via{: target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer” } via @Jyothsnasrin
circe 0.9.0-M1 released via Travis Brown
sbt-compat 1.0.0 released via Dale Wijnand
Announcing Tour of Eta via Jyothsna Srinivas ___

Suggested information to digest this week:

The functional programming community has no shortage of excellent conferences, talks, and articles. Here are some that you might have missed the first time.

Jessika Kerr:

Jessika Kerr presented Pure Functional Programming in Elm at the Codestar.Night Meetup. You can watch the video here: