Scala on Android

With Maciek Gorywoda

From Maciej: "For almost four years now, I have worked professionally on the Android client of an end-to-end encrypted messenger, in Scala. In Android, we deal a lot with events coming from many sources: the user, the backend, the Android OS itself… The code we write has to be very reactive—and it should also be concise and able to process all those events concurrently to squeeze all we can from limited resources. Scala should thrive under those conditions. And yet, it’s almost non-existent. People who still write it are forced to use old versions of libraries, on top of an old version of the language itself, to modify Gradle scripts, and basically to jump through countless loopholes that shouldn’t exist. Most of those people already either moved to other market niches… or to other programming languages.

In this talk, I want to outline how we ended up in this weird position. What attempts were made in the past to introduce Scala on Android, and how they failed. What hacks and concessions are needed in the present to still be able to write Scala on Android. But also, I want to tell you about recent developments that give me a reason to believe that the future might be better. It will require a lot of effort, though, and so I want to inspire you to help me."

Maciek graduated from Warsaw University of Technology in 2005, has used Scala since 2013, and currently works in Berlin at Wire, coding the Android client of an encrypted messenger. He makes YouTube videos about the basics of FP and Agile. In the future, he'd like to see a Scala comeback to Android and would like to help with that.

This Meetup will be recorded and posted to YouTube. Please note that you will need to log in to Zoom with an account in order to participate and that attendance is first come, first served, limited to 100 people.