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Comment by Philipp__ | Hacker News Reader

What grabbed my attention the most in terms of Scala is Dotty. New compiler for Scala, who's main goal is simplification and reorganization of language. You know it will be for real when even Martin is working on it! This language has bright future.

Edit: grammar, sry.

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> This language has bright future.

Yeah, it definitely looks good (to me). Dotty looks really promising to a layman like me especially since it's based on the machine-checked DOT calculus, so should have a better foundation than scalac. Then there are big projects like Spark, Akka, Play etc. But what I like the most about Scala at the moment is the continued effort regarding Scala.js, which seems to be one of the best compile-2-javascript projects. I like ur/web, and what comes the closest to it seems to be scala/scala.js.

I wonder if the collection redesign which is planned for scala 2.13 helps reduce the file size when compiling to js. Hello world is around ~40 kb (minified and gzipped) but goes to 100-150 kb for more involved things.

>continued effort regarding Scala.js

It's a shame the documentation is so poor for scalajs.

Could you elaborate on specific points that would require improvements? Most feedback I receive says it's good. If those of you who think it's poor only tell us "it's poor", there is nothing we can do to improve it.

I'm about to start using it again, but one point: the installation page[1] doesn't actually tell you how to install it...

[1] http://www.scala-js.org/doc/

Hum, that's because you don't actually need to install Scala.js per se. sbt will download and use it for your project automatically.

I agree that the way it is presented on that page is confusing, though. I'll add some explanation about that when I get back from conferences.

Thanks for the feedback!

For what it's worth, I've found the documentation to be quite good, and easy to follow. Thanks for all of your hard work.

Having said that, I agree it would be good to hear more from people who dislike the current documentation. Scala.js is a great project, and so it seems worthwhile to make any documentation changes that would make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

I haven't looked at scala.js, but as a new-ish scala user I thought the kick-off post in that mailing list drama from last month summarized my thoughts pretty well.

I won't argue about the documentation of Scala in general. But a post in the thread you are referring to was specifically mentioning Scala.js as not having the same issues.

Well Martin also worked on scalac, with all its warts & problems, so you can't say that it will be better just because he's also working on it. :)

IMO much more important is the fact that Dotty is being developed after several years and iterations of scalac. Ideally this would mean that the problems to be solved, and the different ways to solve them are known. Dotty can do this without having a large legacy inherited code base. To me this is more important.

I think one of the best things about Dotty is that they now have a proven theory that the language works on top of (DOT calculus http://scala-lang.org/blog/2016/02/03/essence-of-scala.html). This has allowed them to remove some unsound things (and work around others in a sound way)

Have you heard any of his presentations on the new compiler architecture?

I'm incredibly impressed with the stewardship of Scala: they did a thorough assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of language and compiler and are working on a complete refoundation of the language semantics and a rewrite of the compiler while also steadily progressing along a multi year roadmap for the current compiler.

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