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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

Since the main thread here is a gripe about compilation speed, here's something more constructive. I've been working with 2.10 for a few months now, and there's a lot that's really exciting.

The biggest addition is macro support, which allows compile-time metaprogramming and code generation. This brings the ability to write very dynamic-looking code that is in fact completely type-safe. These capabilities have been used to great effect by Slick (a new database library based on ScalaQuery), ScalaMock, and others. Right now the tooling support for writing macros is a bit weak, but I expect it to improve now that 2.10 has been released.

There's a lot else to like here, with built-in futures and promises from Akka, string interpolation, reflection, and a bunch of speed improvements and bug fixes.

It's great work by the Scala team, and an exciting start to a new year!

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I'm really looking forward to using 2.10 now that it's (finally!) final. Over the last year it's been really interesting to see Scala popping up all over the place. One of the interesting data points is that downloads of the Scala plugin for IntelliJ have crossed the 350,000 mark. I have yet to encounter anyone who wants to go back to Java after having used Scala for a project. For many of us it's the first language that's a viable successor to Java.

IntelliJ IDEA is awesome for working with Scala and it's free too - the Scala plugin works with the community edition.

Personally I got the "doomsday" offer which had a huge discount for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. And in my opinion, this IDE is worth every penny and I'm sad that I've stuck with Eclipse when I was working on Java projects.

why would you be stuck on eclipse when working on java?

Side note: Very likely, he's not. I think you're just being overly pedantic on verb tenses. Change "I've" to "I'd" if that makes it easier to read.

To be back on topic, I had a very similar experience after using Eclipse for several years. A co-worker introduced me to IntelliJ in 2005, and I have not regretted the decision since. IntelliJ is a fantastic IDE, particularly for Java.

Not pedantic, just misunderstood. Yep IJ is awesome. I tried eclipse again a couple years ago and there is no contest

I got in on the same offer.

I found that it had feature parity with Eclipse for the most part, but there was enough missing that I went back to Eclipse. Time to donate!

What is missing?

For one thing, Intellij doesn't autoimport classes. I was trying out Play 2.0 and autocomplete didn't find a ton of classes for instance play.data.Form.

A minor thing, sure, and there are ways around it, but the Eclipse Scala IDE found all classes. I have gripes about Eclipse as well, but nothing is perfect.

That's strange. I had no problem resolving that class on a default new Play 2.0 Scala app in IDEA 12. Unless I misunderstand your complaint... I have to hit Alt+Enter to select the Package+Class to Import since sometimes (usually) there are Class name conflicts. But it always resolves the dependencies properly.

What I mean is that play.data.Form wasn't in the initial autocomplete list; when I typed F-o-r it didn't suggest play.data.Form ( among others). Only after I had cancelled did it ask me for alt+enter to select one of the conflicting names.

IntelliJ does do autoimport. I have very occasionally seen IntelliJ not offer an import suggestion for a class I have used, but overall it's an extremely polished experience.

enable "import on the fly" from settings.

The one thing I couldn't live without was pausing threads without a breakpoint. I found Eclipse background compilation to be faster and the compilation errors as you type to be better and more responsive.

I also use Eclipse for C/C++ but I run a separate instance for C/C++ so using IntelliJ wasn't an issue.

For my workflow IntelliJ didn't seem to add anything, but it did take away one or two small things.

You forgot the link to Slick [0].

It's worth mentioning that Slick is a lot like .NET's LINQ to SQL.

[0] http://slick.typesafe.com/

I recently used Slick a bit in combination with Play.

On one hand I was really impressed by its capabilities, on the other hand the documentation is unfortunately lacking...

I think Slick has great potential and hope that typesafe brings the documentation onto a quality level similar to Play. If you want to try it out today and get stuck, after some time I found it quicker to look at their test cases first before googling, much more info there than in the docu and example projects.

The project is new, being at RC1 for the first stable release and relies heavily on Scala 2.10, so it is understandable that it lacks documentation. On the other hand, Slick is the only alternative to LINQ that I know of.

All in all, exciting times ahead.

The documentation has never been good, Zeiger is a genius who clearly has little interest in revealing the inner workings of his mind; instead, he let's you figure it out, which is a mixed blessing -- ScalaQuery source code was basically my intro to Scala

How about Squeryl [0], I used it for my first Scala project with Play! and for the most part it was a delight.

[0]http://squeryl.org/

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