Code Guidelines

Code Guidelines#

Scala Language usage Philosophy#

There are two phases of execution in chronon code. Hot path & control path. Hot path is in sense the “inner loop” of the larger program. The speed of the the inner loop controls the speed of the whole program. While changes to control path are less impactful. Any row/column level operation is a part of the inner loop. This is true across all online & offline workflows.

Rules for inner loops#

  • Don’t use scala for loops

  • Don’t use ranges : foreach, until, to

  • Don’t use Options and Tuples

  • Don’t use immutable collections

  • Create naked Arrays when the size is known ahead of time

  • Move as many branches as possible out of hot path into the control path.

    • Leverage data schemas to do so.

      • Example: Convert arbitrary numeric value of a df at position columnIndex Branches in hot path (two isInstance calls per value)

        // inefficient version

def toDouble(o: Any): Double = {
    if (o.isInstance[Int]) { 
      o.asInstanceOf[Int].toDouble
    } else if (o.isInstance[Long]) { 
      o.asInstanceOf[Long].toDouble
    } 
    . . .
}

df.rdd.map(toDouble(row(columnIndex)))

        Branches in control path (one isInstance call per value)

        // efficient version

def toDoubleFunc(inputType: DataType): Any => Double = {
    inputType match { 
      case IntType => x: Any => x.asInstanceOf[Int].toDouble 
      case LongType => x: Any => x.asInstanceOf[Long].toDouble 
    } 
}
val doubleFunc = toDoubleFunc(df.schema(columnIndex).dataType)
df.rdd.map(doubleFunc(row(columnIndex)))

Readability#

Scala is a large language with a lot of powerful features. Some of these features however were added without regard to readability. The biggest culprit is the overloading of the implicit keyword.

We have restricted the code base to use implicit only to retroactively extend classes. A.K.A as extension objects. Every other use should be minimized.

Scala 3 fixes a lot of these design mistakes, but the world is quite far from adopting Scala 3.

Having said all that, Scala 2 is leagues ahead of any other language on JVM, in terms of power. Also Spark APIs are mainly in Scala2.

Testing#

Every new behavior should be unit-tested. We have implemented a fuzzing framework that can produce data randomly as scala objects or spark tables - see. Use it for testing. Python code is also covered by tests - see.

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