193. Wrocław JUG - Taming the context beast - Paweł Marks

Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/pl-PL/wroclawjug/events/289030540/
The presentation is in Polish 🇵🇱

Context functions debut in Scala 3.0 but are still alien to many Scala developers. In my talk, I’d like to tame the beasts and benefit from them.

First, I will start with the basics. I am going to explain where the idea of context functions came from and what problem they intended to solve. Then I will show how to put them to work by creating simple DSL.

Subsequently, we’ll get to know the unexpected sides of the beasts: How they interact with type inference, the weirdest part of the context functions. I’ll go into more detail and explain why context functions behave differently from ordinary functions in the type system.

Lastly, I’ll tackle an important question: “Is it true that context functions don’t compose well?” I’ll show the common pitfalls and how to avoid them, and I’ll reveal some nifty hacks I came across while experimenting.

I hope that after this talk, the listeners will be able to use and understand context functions but also understand where and how they can safely use them and where they should avoid them.

Speaker: Paweł Marks

I am the lead of the Scala 3 compiler team @ Virtuslab, Kraków. I have been passionate about development efficiency since University. I spent a significant part of my career working on Kotlin tooling. Being an architect and team lead responsible for complete rewrite of Dokka - Kotlin's documentation engine was an excellent experience for me.

In 2020 I turned my interest to Scala 3. Shortly after, I became a member of the compiler team. My primary responsibilities are releasing the new versions of the compiler and helping other team members.