JVM Language Summit 2011 Videos

Anyone else find Scala representation conspicuous by its absence at the JVM lang summit this year?

From what I can see there's been no talk relating to Scala and the challenges it has overcome and/or faces regarding its use of the JVM. Maybe, for now it has all been said and Scala is happily ploughing forward.

I read recently a quote from Martin Odersky [1] claiming that the virtual extensions methods (aka public defender methods) proposed by Brian Goetz et al comes tantalisingly close (but not quite) to allowing Scala to drop some of its class bloat from its libraries and runtime. It'd be great to see some Scala guys doing some talks on this kind of thing. Perhaps they're all busy covering the other conferences right now.

Similarly I don't see any representatives in the Project lambda mailing list speaking up for Scala's interests with regards to the changes to the JVM that need to be decided for Java 8. I'd hate to see comments and suggestions being made towards accommodating Scala but being rejected since its too late in the game w.r.t. Java 8. From what I can see opportunities to affect the JVM's evolution don't happen often.

I'm sure Martin et al are doing what they feel is necessary, it would be nice to be able follow the progress somewhere though!

[1] http://www.infoq.com/interviews/martin-odersky-scala-future

I watched most of Charles Nutter's JRuby and invoke dynamic talk. It is a good reminder for Java/Clojure/JRuby/Jython/Scala developers just how important the platform is. This was driven home for me this week because I spent a lot of time helping a customer deal with some nasty GC problems.

A bit off topic, but: JVM developers don't need to know the following information cold, but we should be familiar enough with it to know where to look when problems occur:

Tuning Garbage Collection with the 5.0 Java[tm] Virtual Machine http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/gc-tuning-5-138395.ht...

Java theory and practice: Garbage collection in the HotSpot JVM; old article but good: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp11253/

JVM specification:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/vmspec/2nd-edition/html/VMSpe...

Platforms should not be black boxes.