Scalar 2026: Celebrating Functional Programming Fiesta

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:58:00 +0000
Scala, Conference, Scalar

Back in 2014, our very first gathering in Warsaw sparked a movement that grew into Central Europe’s premier destination for functional programming enthusiasts. This March, we returned to the Polin Conference Centre to celebrate the 11th edition of the Scalar - functional programming fiesta.

Over two intensive days, we showed that even as the industry pivots toward autonomous agents and distributed AI, the core values of Scala, purity, expressiveness, and safety, remain the essential foundation for reliable engineering.

Do you trust your AI agents? And much more

The first day was a masterclass in the ecosystem’s evolution, beginning with a visionary keynote from Martin Odersky (pictured below), the creator of Scala. Martin addressed the pressing question of the AI era: "How can we trust our agents?" He argued we must move beyond simple testing and adopt a systematic approach using types and capabilities to build trust directly into the language.

This ambitious tone was grounded in the practical roadmap of the Scala 3.9 LTS era by Piotr Chabelski, who provided a framework for navigating upcoming releases while maintaining the stability the community values.

The morning peaked with Wojciech Mazur’s (pictured below) look behind the scenes of the Open Community Build. His team’s monumental task of building and migrating nearly 2,000 open-source projects every week ensures the Scala ecosystem remains stress-free and ready for every new release.

As the technical journey expanded into high-performance computing, Szymon Rodziewicz and Marcin Złakowski impressed the crowd with Cyfra, a project that brings Scala’s high-level abstractions to the parallel power of GPUs. This exploration of the hardware-software interface continued with Anton Sviridov, who demonstrated that Scala Native and C can interact "as tight as brothers," expanding our reach into low-level systems with Scala’s signature elegance.

To solve overwhelming code generation in massive projects, Pierre Ricadat introduced a "Scala-First" approach to Protobuf, offering a cleaner alternative for organizations managing tens of thousands of data definitions.

The afternoon focused on the evolving landscape of concurrency and theory. Riccardo Cardin navigated "The Concurrency Triangle," providing a needed comparison between Fibers, Virtual Threads, and Coroutines. This was followed by a lively debate led by Jonathan Winandy, who evaluated the newcomer Kyo against veterans like ZIO and Cats Effect, sparking discussions that lasted long after the final slide.

We also explored research-driven tools with Philipp Haller and Oskar Gronman (pictured below), who presented McCCT for controlled concurrency testing, while Vasil Vasilev showcased how the IntelliJ Scala Plugin is evolving to support modern virtualized developer environments.

The first day reached its technical crescendo with deep dives into mastering Scala 3. Daniel Ciocirlan delivered a live-coding demonstration of capture checking, one of the language’s most significant new features. Nicolas Rinaudo then argued for "Effects as Capabilities," showing how developers can enjoy the readability of imperative style without sacrificing the reasoning power of monadic style.

Finally, Alexandru Nedelcu (pictured below) closed the sessions with a comprehensive guide to Type-Classes in Scala 3, mastering the new rules for givens, extension...