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Comment by mhio | Hacker News Reader

What metric do you use for popularity? I'm more involved in the systems side so I'm definitely over exposed to Go projects. I would have considered Scala to be at least an order of magnitude less "popular" than Go. Kafka is the only open source project in Scala I can recall running into but there's probably a whole enterprise world I don't see.

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For open source projects, it’s very popular in the “big data” world. Kafka, as you mentioned, but also Spark, Flink, Summingbird, Scalding, etc.

And yeah, it’s a pretty popular backend language at some large companies. Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, the Guardian, Starbucks, AirBnB, Coursera, AT&T, etc. all make significant use of Scala.

Go is certainly bigger, but Scala has plenty of adoption too.

Kafka is currently undergoing a rewrite into java.

Indeed. To add further it is also facing competition from Apache Pulsar and NATS. Not to forget Redpanda a Kafka rewrite in C++.

a small note on redpanda. Is not a `rewrite`. It is an entire new storage engine, different consensus protocol, different on-disk format, different internal RPC, no external dependencies, ...., in fact when i started it it was using flatbuffers as the API. What we did later to make money is add a kafka-API translation layer, but in terms of code size, is a very small part. The way i'd recommend thinking about it is a new storage engine that is compatible w/ kafka clients. https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/tree/dev/src/v/kaf... - this is basically all the kafka-related code, the rest is net-new design.

Source?

https://www.quora.com/Kafka-is-written-in-scala-Why-does-the...

But the guy answering there is talking about the Java clients.

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