Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
LAMBDAFICATOR: from imperative to functional programming through automated refactoring
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
Crossing the gap from imperative to functional programming through refactoring
Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Rockdove is the backend service that powers the geospatial features on Twitter.com and the Twitter API ("Twitter Places"). It provides a datastore for places and a geospatial search engine to find them. To throw out some buzzwords, it is: •a distributed system •realtime (immediately indexes updates and changes) •horizontally scalable •fault tolerant Rockdove is written entirely in Scala and was developed by 2 engineers with no prior Scala experience (nor with Java or the JVM). We think the geospatial search engine provides an interesting case study as it presents a mix of algorithm problems and "classic" scaling and optimization issues. We will report on our experience using Scala, focusing especially on: •"functional" systems design •concurrency and parallelism •using a "research language" in practice •when, where and why we turned the "functional dial" •avoiding mutable state