Telescope started as a converter registry, drifted into an academic port of Scala Monocle's optic lattice, and turned — through five rewrites — into a single-type Java DSL with compile-time codegen, a generated Path navigator, and a benchmark suite that says it pays. The story of getting category theory to disappear.
How KPipe stacks up against Confluent Parallel Consumer, Reactor Kafka, and a hand-rolled KafkaConsumer + virtual-thread executor. Latest snapshot from the 4-runtime harness.