Scala Days 2026

Alex Nemish

Alexander Nemish is the CTO and founder of Lantr, blockchain solutions and R&D labs, where he leads development of Scalus, an open-source platform for building Cardano smart contracts and decentralized applications in Scala 3.
He is a software engineer specializing in functional programming, type theory, metaprogramming, compilers, and blockchain systems, working primarily in Scala, Haskell, and Rust. Previously, he was an engineer at IOG (Input Output Global), where he contributed to the design and implementation of Marlowe, a domain-specific language for financial smart contracts on Cardano, and earlier he built server-side platforms in the banking sector.
He is a long-time member of the Scala community and a past speaker at ScalaUA.


Company/Organisation:

Lantr

Job Position:

CTO


Session

10-13
11:20
30min
Blazing-Fast Lambda Calculus via Metaprogramming
Alex Nemish

Interpreting lambda calculus is simple but slow. Using multi-stage metaprogramming, we built a JIT that compiles each program to native JVM code at load time, running 2–10x faster than existing interpreters – including heavily optimized Rust and Haskell implementations. The surprising part: staging resulted in remarkably little code.

Palais Atelier