Month / March 2017

by Leif

What are Scala Type Classes?

What are Scala type classes, what kind of problem do they solve and how are they implemented?

In a nut shell, type classes provide polymorphism without using subtyping, but in a completely type safe way.

Type classes represent some common functionality that can be applied to values of many different types. Moreover, we don't have to change existing types in order to extend them with the new functionality.

In this post I will describe 5 simple steps for encoding a type class in Scala in an idiomatic way.

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by Leif

7 Most Convenient Ways To Create A Future Either Stack

In Scala Future[A] and Either[A, B] are very useful and commonly used types. Very often we want to combine them, but a Future[Either[A, B]] is kind of awkward to handle not only because we don't want to have to call Await anywhere.

One way to deal with this is to stack the types into a combined data type EitherT defined in Cats that is much easier to handle.

Still it can be quite unwieldy to compose values of this new type with other values of different types.

To get nice composability (e.g. with for comprehensions) we have to wrap other values into the new type by lifting them up inside the monad stack.

Here are the most convenient ways that I found to do that.
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