Does Scala scale better than other JVM languages?

Question

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 1

There's an interesting discussion from the Twitter developers themselves in the comments of this post. They've evaluated the different options and decided to implement the back-end in Scala because: it ran faster than the Ruby/JRuby alternatives and they felt they could benefit from static typing.