Does Scala scale better than other JVM languages?

ruby scala twitter scalability jruby
johnny picture johnny · Jun 3, 2009 · Viewed 7.4k times · Source

Here is the only way I know to ask it at the moment. As Understand it Scala uses the Java Virtual Machine. I thought Jruby did also. Twitter switched its middleware to Scala. Could they have done the same thing and used Jruby?

Could they have started with Jruby to start with and not had their scaling problems that caused them to move from Ruby to Scala in the first place? Do I not understand what Jruby is? I'm assuming that because Jruby can use Java it would have scaled where Ruby would not.

Does it all boil down to the static versus dynamic types, in this case?

Answer

Daniel C. Sobral picture Daniel C. Sobral · Jun 3, 2009

Scala is "scalable" in the sense that the language can be improved upon by libraries in a way that makes the extensions look like they are part of the language. That's why actors looks like part of the language, or why BigInt looks like part of the language.

This also applies to most other JVM languages. It does not apply to Java, because it has special treatment for it's basic types (Int, Boolean, etc), for operators, cumbersome syntax that makes clear what is built in the language and what is library, etc.

Now, Scala is more performatic than dynamic languages on the JVM because the JVM has no support for them. Dynamic languages on JVM have to resort t reflection, which is very slow.

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