A modern software platform for the era of multicore and cloud computing – Q&A with Mark Brewer fromTypesafe

Grazed from Ebedded Computing.  Author: Jennifer Hesse.

Created from the ground up to address multicore and parallel computing, the Scala programming language smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling developers to be more productive while retaining full interoperability with Java. Mark explains how Scala-based middleware technology can maximize modern multicore hardware and cloud computing software by raising the abstraction level for building multithreaded applications.

ECD: What are the advantages of using general-purpose programming languages like Java and Scala for embedded development?.

BREWER: Scala is a general-purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling developers to be more productive while retaining full interoperability with Java and taking advantage of modern multicore hardware…

Scala is also a functional language. Inspired by the long tradition of functional programming, Scala makes it easy to avoid shared state so that computation can be readily distributed across cores on a multicore server and across servers in a data center. This makes Scala an especially good match for modern multicore CPUs and distributed cloudcomputing workloads that require concurrency and parallelism.

Scala is equipped with an expressive type system that detects and avoids many kinds of application errors at compile time. At the same time, a sophisticated type inference capability frees developers from the redundant type information “boilerplate code” that is typical of Java…

Read more of the interview from the source @ http://embedded-computing.com/articles/a-brewer-president-ceo-typesafe/#