Eta Fibers: Towards Better Concurrency on the JVM by Rahul Muttineni at FnConf17
Channel: ConfEngine
Date: 2017-11-29

In order to handle modern, real-time demands, companies are moving to reactive microservice architectures. These architectures are much more flexible but must be programmed asynchronously to minimize latency and handle as many concurrent requests as possible. However, asynchronous programs are hard to read, maintain, and debug. We solve this in Eta with Fibers. 

Eta is a pure, lazy, statically-typed language on the JVM that gives you the power of Haskell on the JVM. By definition, Eta is well-designed to handle the problems of concurrent & distributed systems with abstractions that are simple to use and reason about.

One of these abstractions is the concept of Fibers which are lightweight, cooperative, and non-blocking threads that allow you to handle concurrency with ease. This contrasts with green threads, which are pre-emptive and cannot be controlled in a fine-grained manner by the developer. Moreover, we have developed a sequenceable (monadic) API for Fibers to unify asynchronous and synchronous code, solving the notorious "callback hell" problem.

Conference link: https://functionalconf.com

More details: https://confengine.com/functional-conf-2017/proposal/5414