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Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

Great to see this come out, but their changelog is pretty odd. A list of numbers without the issue title is kinda hard to get a handle on.

Having said all that, if anyone knows what really went into the release I'd love to hear it. Major fixes or things to look out for would be great.

[edit: Softer language to convey my intent better.]

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scala interpreter/REPL is starting up in about 0.5 seconds now compared to 7-8 seconds with 2.9.0.1 on my system using Sun JDK 64-bit.

System scripting in Scala suddenly got a lot more appealing :-)

Hang on--that's 0.5s for server (64-bit) hotspot? That's astonishing.

Any details on how they were able to achieve it?

Aye, 64-bit hotspot with implicit -server switch, but going on your astonishment I took a look and it seems the 0.5s time is only achieved with fsc running from previous runs of the REPL. So from cold, i.e. no fsc running it takes about 3 seconds. 2.9.0-1 was taking 7-8 seconds to get the REPL prompt regardless of whether fsc was running already, so this is still like night and day for me :-)

Amongst other things it looks like Paul Phillips (a.k.a extempore) has done a lot of optimisation work. This looks like a pretty important one:

https://codereview.scala-lang.org/fisheye/changelog/scala-sv...

Oh, ok, so fsc is comparable to just connecting to a nailgun daemon, right?

I don't actually know Scala; is there a tl;dr for that link?

(I couldn't find a good summation, maybe there are more substantive m-list threads in internals:

http://groups.google.com/group/scala-internals/browse_frm/th...

http://groups.google.com/group/scala-internals/browse_thread...

That's still a pretty massively long time compared to, say, Ocaml or Haskell. (0.01 seconds for hello world, for both of them)

It's still appeals too long for me.

And the previous release announcements look all the same except for the bug list. Imho a brief description, at least for final releases, would be a nice addition. Not everyone follows the scala-language mailing list.

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