Hacker News Reader

Comment by vzip | Hacker News Reader

One of the few languages that, when dying, appears to increase in use.

The thing is that most of the things that people don't like with scala will actually disappear without doing anything.

One of the greatest problem is compilation time, however since computers get better this will be reduced. And still the team is working to bring more Scala <-> Java interop and a newer compiler which will bring compilation times down, too.

Single thread performance is not getting better anymore. Addition of new cores does not cut compilation time (at least for Scala compiler).

Sure, but Scala 2.12 replaces anonymous classes with Java 8 functional interfaces. Vast reduction in generated bytecode as a result, thus, not only faster compile times but also perhaps better run time performance (though hotspot, miracle of engineering that it is, does a pretty good job of optimizing most anything you throw at it).

Saying that, Scala 2.12 will still be relatively slow compared to say, C, Go, Java and similar languages not high up on the abstraction ladder. The real compiler speed up will be coming with Dotty (Scala 3). Martin Odersky estimates that Dotty will be up to 4X faster than present day Scala.

See also

    Improved incremental compilation of #scala in the
    making yields 10-40x compilation speedups:
    https://github.com/sbt/sbt/issues/1104#issuecomment-188529825

and

    After turning on the java8 backend in Scala, our 
    bytecode size decreased by 50% and compile times
    decreased by 75%. Amazeballs!

by some Scala devs.

looking forward to the reactions from people regarding compilation times when sbt 1.0 and scala 2.12 land. hope a broad spectrum of code get's these compilation time improvements.

Actually after I truned java8 backend on I got a reduced compile time. (after changing code). Actually we use Scala as a Improved Java, so we likely don't use so much "heavy" things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com