Phantom Types Are Not Spooky- Scala 3
Discover how phantom types enhance the builder pattern in Scala, ensuring all steps are complete before object creation. See practical examples like a database connection builder and learn how compile-time checks improve type safety and prevent errors.
© 2023 The Turing Taco Tales / Oscar Mauricio Forero Carrillo
Originally published at The Turing Taco Tales on June 29, 2024.
Introduction
Phantom types are a fascinating and powerful feature in Scala that adds a layer of type safety and expressiveness to our code. Despite their name, phantom types aren’t spooky at all. They can act like friendly ghosts, helping us enforce constraints and ensure correctness at compile time without any runtime overhead.
In this article, we’ll demystify phantom types, explaining what they are, how they work, and their benefits to our Scala programming. We’ll see how these “ghosts” can assist us in creating more robust and maintainable code by providing compile-time guarantees for various conditions and constraints.
Let’s dive in and see how these friendly phantoms can help us in our programming tasks.
