Scala’s general purpose Java Virtual Machine based programming language has reached release candidate stage for its 2.9.0 edition. Integrating features of both object-oriented and functional programming languages, self confessed Scala-converts typically boast claims of code sizes that are reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application
The Scala 2.9.0 codebase includes several additions, notably the new Parallel Collections (or “par”) feature, but it also introduces improvements on many existing features and contains many bug fixes.
The Parallel Collections feature is designed to utilise multicore processors by implementing bulk operations such as foreach, map, filter etc. in parallel. This in turn “should” provide better optimisation of the code itself in the face of multi-core processors, which are often underutilised in terms of missed concurrency opportunities.
Programmers can convert back to a corresponding sequential collection from ‘par’ using the seq method.
According to official Scala sources, “Some Java programmers find Scala a little alien at first but soon enjoy the concise way they can express their ideas as programs. Less key-strokes to make. Type inferencing, everything-is-an-object, function passing and other features cut away unneeded syntactic overhead. With growing experience they find Scala has the abstraction support to simplify the creation of safe, generic libraries that are easy to use.”
This release candidate version of Scala is not intended for full-blown production usage and is presented to developers for testing and feedback in the normal fashion.
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