I have looked at scala on and off at times - wrote one 20 line program
before - that was it. Friday I wrote my first serious Scala program,
and over the weekend I tried doing some performance measurements to see
if I could use on a project. I have some code generating dummy data,
passing into a dispatcher Actor, which feeds into 20 accumulator actors
(for concurrent processing), with results being merged back into buffers
to be shipped out to a file (I did not actually ship to a file - just
dropped data on the floor). So I got the whole code going in a day or two.
Observations:
(1) Doing easy stuff in Scala was easy. I got a lot done without
understanding the powerful and complex type system Scala has. I think
there is a big difference between writing most code and library code.
My small application however did not do any "fold left" etc stuff -
basically a Java programmer writing Scala code.
(2) The entire application was 156 lines (no comments). One line case
classes were great compared to a Java class with fields, setters, and
getters etc. (I used them for Actor messages.)
(3) Actors made it so much easier to get concurrency into the
application. Hardest thing turned out how to do a graceful shutdown
after all work completed. (I ended up sending a EOF style message and
have it propagate through all the actors to guarantee all work had been
completed.) No locks anywhere in sight in my code.
(4) My first attempt code ran 100 times too slow for my needs. I
tripled the performance pretty quickly, and am sure I could probably get
it to go ten times faster again, but my results were such that with
deadlines etc I am facing and risk etc, we will go with C++ instead.
The code was also not complete (so had to add a lot more in). Just too
risky to convince management (err, which is me actually) to introduce a
new unknown language for this particular project. Zero experience on
optimizing Scala code available in house, with maybe a hundred man years
of C++ optimizing experience on tap.
Alan
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java
Posse" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
