A Type-Based Foundation for Closure-Passing in the Age of Concurrency and Distribution

Functional programming (FP) is regularly touted as the way forward for bringing parallel, concurrent, and distributed programming to the mainstream. However, despite this established viewpoint, reliably distributing function closures over a network, or using them in concurrent environments nonetheless remains a challenge across FP and OO languages. Our work on Spores takes a step towards more principled distributed and concurrent programming by introducing a new closure-like abstraction and type system that can guarantee closures to be serializable, thread-safe, or have custom user-defined properties. In ongoing work we explore the combination of Spores and Scala Pickling to provide a common substrate for type-safe, performant data-intensive applications.