Minutes of the 28th meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2023

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scala 3 maintenance and evolution, the Scala Improvement Process, Scala.js maintenance and tooling and tutorials, the Scala Toolkit, the Scala websites, the Scala Tooling Summit, TASTy-MiMa and TASTy-Query, Metals and BSP, Scaladex, the Scala 3 Compiler Academy and Compiler Sprees, Google Summer of Code, Scala Lunches at EPFL, Scala Days, and the Center’s five-year impact report.

Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:

Two new proposals were received this quarter:

Both proposals were voted on and accepted by the board.

Other business discussed included SCP-027 (Refactoring), the Tooling Summit, and company overviews for Morgan Stanley and Spotify.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 15:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

  • Chris Kipp (chairperson)
    • also board member, representing Lunatech
  • Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
  • Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
  • Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Apologies:

  • Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL

Board members:

  • Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
  • Maureen Elsberry, Xebia Functional
  • Claire McGinty & Kellen Dye, Spotify
  • Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
  • Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
  • Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
  • Eugene Yokota, community representative

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. He presented from these slides, which concisely show what the Center is working on:

His slides and remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q1 quarterly activity report:

And the Center’s Q2 roadmap:

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.

SCP-027: Refactoring

Julien asked the board about SCP-027: Refactoring, which he suggested be marked “dormant”, based on what seems to be limited interest from either the board or the community. The proposal was originally submitted by Eugene when he was representing Twitter. In response, Eugene observed that there were multiple talks at Scala Matsuri about refactoring in large monorepos and reaffirmed the proposal’s importance, in his opinion (though he acknowledged that resources are always finite). Darja and Julien said let’s wait to see if there was any more external feedback, before changing the proposal’s status.

Management report

Darja presented this section. She especially highlighted the following items.

Since the last meeting, the Scala Center published the following annual roadmap for 2023:

Scala.js celebrated its 10th anniversary:

The Scala Center hosted a Tooling Summit at EPFL, with about 40 participants:

The Center published its Five Year Impact Report:

Staffing levels remained constant this quarter, except for interns. Quentin Bernet’s internship with the Center is now complete. Johanna Reichen and Lucas Nouguier have joined the Center for a limited time.

Darja shared some thoughts and plans around fundraising for the Center. Some discussion followed.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

The Scala 2.13.11 and 2.12.18 releases are nearly complete but will wait for 3.3.0 to happen first. Since the last meeting, we opened the following Discourse threads for discussion and updates on release timing:

Since the meeting, these threads were updated to include draft release notes. Themes in these releases including alignment with Scala 3, linting, JDK 20 and 21 support, Vector concatenation, reimplemented LinkedHashMap and LinkedHashSet, supported for Java 17’s sealed, and more.

Community report

Eugene said that recurring concerns in the community currently include Scala 3 adoption, the Akka relicensing, competing library ecosystems, and the question of what Scala’s main use cases or selling points are perceived to be, going forward.

Proposals

SCP-029: Sbt community repository

The text of Eugene’s proposal is here:

  • SCP-029: Sbt community repository

The proposal was prompted by the recent (April 7) repo.scala-sbt.org outage. It proposes making the Scala Center responsible for ensuring the continuance of sbt’s artifact hosting. The repository in question contains both old sbt plugins and current (and old) Linux installers.

As one board member observed, sbt isn’t formally a Scala Center project, and this proposal, which is limited in scope to binary hosting, wouldn’t change that. But the community doesn’t always make these distinctions around ownership; an sbt outage is damaging to Scala’s image regardless.

Julien said the Center is already investigating options. (Perhaps the existing hosting is adequate as long as we are better prepared to respond to outages?)

A suggestion was made to host the Linux installers on GitHub instead.

Voting: The proposal was accepted, by unanimous vote of members present.

SCP-030: Governance page for Scala

Krzysztof presented his proposal. He emphasized that the proposal isn’t to create any new structures or responsibilities, but just to document what exists. He also said that incremental progress on documenting governance would be valuable; it doesn’t need to happen all at once.

Seth noted on the pull request that there is already a “Who’s behind Scala?” section on the Community page here, as a modest starting point.

Darja noted that any such page would need regular updating, and it would be important for the page not to promise more than the Center is actually able to provide.

Voting: The proposal was accepted, by unanimous vote of members present.

Other topics

Tooling Summit

Since time was running short, Chris kept his remarks about the recent Tooling Summit very brief. He said that conversation is ongoing about setting up some ongoing structure for work and communication around Scala tooling.

Maureen said that the interviews recorded at the summit are still being edited.

Company overviews

Daniela gave an overview of Scala usage at Morgan Stanley.

Claire gave an overview of Scala usage at Spotify.

Conclusion

As was usual through 2019, we hope to hold an in-person board meeting later this year in conjunction with Scala Days.