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Comment by sjrd | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Scala Native is developed at EPFL for real.

Will Lightbend be supporting this project in any way?

The reason I ask is that I see on GitHub that you are the only contributor so far. This project is quite a large commitment for a single person, I'm hesitant to play around with Scala Native without knowing more about future plans for support, milestones, etc.

Having said that, this project looks awesome. Nice work so far!

There have been so many successful projects started by one person. Shooting it down before seeing what will be done is a bad idea.

I'm interested in it breaking away from the JVM to become more performant, since that has been one of my concerns about Scala; there is a lot of good about JVM-based languages, but when in the ring with other languages like Go, you need to be quick to win.

I hope that others join him, but there's no reason to believe he can't do it if he sets his mind to it.

Note that I am not concerned about the fact that the project was started by one person, nor am I dismissing it altogether.

The author of this project is most definitely a smart and capable individual. However, at some point this project will reach a point where it requires more work than one individual can achieve, hence the question regarding official support - is there any financing, plans for new contributors, etc.

I understand your concern, but, as I said, a number of authors have not have financing, plans for new contributors, etc. in the beginning and have been successful; these are not requirement for success in the beginning.

For example, here is the story of how Python got its start from Guido van Rossum (quote from 1996):

"Over six years ago, in December 1989, I was looking for a "hobby" programming project that would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas. My office ... would be closed, but I had a home computer, and not much else on my hands. I decided to write an interpreter for the new scripting language I had been thinking about lately: a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix/C hackers. I chose Python as a working title for the project, being in a slightly irreverent mood (and a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus)."

And the history of how Ruby got its start by Yukihiro Matsumoto (quote from 1999) is similar:

"I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn't like it really, because it had the smell of a toy language (it still has). The object-oriented language seemed very promising. I knew Python then. But I didn't like it, because I didn't think it was a true object-oriented language — OO features appeared to be add-on to the language. As a language maniac and OO fan for 15 years, I really wanted a genuine object-oriented, easy-to-use scripting language. I looked for but couldn't find one. So I decided to make it."

Denys Shabalin is working under the author of Scala and corresponding regularly with the author of Scala.js, so he has more support than either van Rossum or Matsumoto did, and neither of them had the plans you spoke of- they just wrote the language because it is what they wanted to do.

Well, Ruby or Python would not have been suitable for many use cases in those days, and probably weren't as widely announced as scala-native is being.

Agreed. I see the statement "It's being developed at EPFL by one engineer" as a very high risk that once this student graduates or moves on to a different university, the project will be abandoned and die.

It's worth noting that Scala.js started this way, and is now mature and used by thousands of developers. I foresee a similar path for Scala Native.

It's worth noting that there was an LLVM-backed Scala project that was abandoned and died, so I definitely hope this avoids the same fate.

There was also a Scala.net project that was abandoned and died.

That's very common for academic projects.

Scala.net didn't die because it was academic. It died due to lack of interest, as nobody cared about a Scala for .NET

ISTR a significant reason it died was the .Net platform's reified generics, which made making a language with generics and a type system more expressive than the underlying platform problematic, and especially made it difficult to have something that would be fully compatible with Scala-on-the-JVM.

That's not really true. Yes there are challenges with reified generics and yes Scala's generics don't fit. However you can work around it by doing the type erasure yourself. You can always consider a List[Int] to be a List[Any] and be done with it. And yes that's going to generate inefficient code, but ClojureCLR doesn't seem to mind.

No, the reason for why Scala.Net didn't happen is because nobody cared. To find proof of this, you only need to look at Clojure. Its .NET implementation is well maintained by David Miller, yet it's very unpopular. And the reason for why .NET developers don't care is because they don't have an open source culture. Or in other words, if it doesn't come from Microsoft, then it doesn't exist.

If you do erasure, then you can't also have the level of platform integration Scala has on the JVM: Scala on .NET either ends up as a different-but-similar language that isn't 100% compatible with Scala-on-JVM on a language level (as well the library differences), or its a second-class citizen that doesn't integrate well with the .NET platform, in which case, why have it?

So, in a sense, no on cared -- because neither of the available options was anything anyone wanted.

Exactly.

It died for technical reasons because .net supports reified generics, which made it pretty much unable to support Scala's type system.

People who keep saying that erased generics is a stupid idea have no idea what they're talking about.

scala-native is facing insurmountable difficulties, the kind that will certainly not be conquered by a single student who will stop working on it as soon as he graduates.

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