The Making of an IO (monads)

All applications, eventually, come down to IO. Well, unless you have uncontrolled side-effects, which would be weird and horrible. This talk explores not only why you want the IO monad in Scala (i.e. why side-effects are weird and horrible), but also how it works. Specifically, we'll be looking at the new cats-effect project, which introduces not only a production-viable IO type for the cats framework, but also a set of typeclasses and rigorous laws for characterizing what an effect type is and how it should behave.

Talk objectives

We will explore the nature of effect types, learn a bit about monads which don't look like List or Maybe, and gain an appreciation for the implementation challenges of lazy effect systems on the JVM.

Talk audience

Scala programmers with an interest in monads, FP in general, concurrency, and performance tuning and correctness on the JVM. Also really anybody who wonders what the point to the IO monad is.