Scala – What does a lazy val do

This answer uses the Manifest-API, which is deprecated as of Scala 2.10. Please see answers below for more current solutions.

Scala was defined with Type Erasure because the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), unlike Java, did not get generics. This means that, at run time, only the class exists, not its type parameters. In the example, JVM knows it is handling a scala.collection.immutable.List, but not that this list is parameterized with Int.

Fortunately, there's a feature in Scala that lets you get around that. It’s the Manifest. A Manifest is class whose instances are objects representing types. Since these instances are objects, you can pass them around, store them, and generally call methods on them. With the support of implicit parameters, it becomes a very powerful tool. Take the following example, for instance:

object Registry {
  import scala.reflect.Manifest
  
  private var map= Map.empty[Any,(Manifest[_], Any)] 
  
  def register[T](name: Any, item: T)(implicit m: Manifest[T]) {
    map = map.updated(name, m -> item)
  }
  
  def get[T](key:Any)(implicit m : Manifest[T]): Option[T] = {
    map get key flatMap {
      case (om, s) => if (om <:< m) Some(s.asInstanceOf[T]) else None
    }     
  }
}

scala> Registry.register("a", List(1,2,3))

scala> Registry.get[List[Int]]("a")
res6: Option[List[Int]] = Some(List(1, 2, 3))

scala> Registry.get[List[String]]("a")
res7: Option[List[String]] = None

When storing an element, we store a "Manifest" of it too. A Manifest is a class whose instances represent Scala types. These objects have more information than JVM does, which enable us to test for the full, parameterized type.

Note, however, that a Manifest is still an evolving feature. As an example of its limitations, it presently doesn't know anything about variance, and assumes everything is co-variant. I expect it will get more stable and solid once the Scala reflection library, presently under development, gets finished.

Case classes can be seen as plain and immutable data-holding objects that should exclusively depend on their constructor arguments.

This functional concept allows us to

• use a compact initialization syntax (Node(1, Leaf(2), None)))
• decompose them using pattern matching
• have equality comparisons implicitly defined

In combination with inheritance, case classes are used to mimic algebraic datatypes.

If an object performs stateful computations on the inside or exhibits other kinds of complex behaviour, it should be an ordinary class.