Minutes of the 31st meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 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 features and compiler performance, Scala.js, the Scala Improvement Process, sbt 2, Scastie, Scala CLI, TASTy Query, Advent of Code, compiler sprees, Google Summer of Code, fundraising, and more.
Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:
No new proposals were received this quarter.
Date, Time and Location
The meeting took place virtually on Tuesday, February 7, 2024 at 15:00 (UTC).
Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).
Attendees
Officers:
- Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
- Sébastien Doeraene (interim technical director), EPFL
- Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
- Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend
Board members:
- Noel Markham, Xebia Functional
- Paweł Marks, VirtusLab (subbing for Krzysztof Romanowski)
- Claire McGinty, Spotify
- Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
- Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
- Eugene Yokota, community representative
Technical report
Seb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. His remarks mainly consisted of brief highlights taken from the Center’s more detailed Q4 quarterly activity report:
And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:
The following notes do not repeat the contents of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.
Martin offered congratulations to Eugene and the Center on getting sbt 2.x initially compiling on Scala 3. Eugene mentioned that a number of “hacks” in the sbt codebase were no longer necessary on Scala 3, and that the new macro implementations were “safer” thanks to Scala 3.
The Center declined to issue a ruling on whether Scala CLI is pronounced “Scala C.L.I.” or “Scala Clee” :-)
Chris asked about broader Scalafix improvements, as previously discussed in 2021 when SCP-027 was submitted. Seb said that hasn’t been revisited recently but they’ll take a second look if there is sufficient engineering time available this year.
Seth observed that Scalafix seems underused in the community, and although it’s not clear why. It could be because it’s not well integrated enough with tooling, and/or insufficient documentation and publicity? And do people know where to find rules?
Branching off the Scalafix discussion, Eugene observed that we don’t have good centralized documentation and recommendations on what compiler flags are available and which ones should be enabled (in general, and also in specific scenarios such as cross-building).
Chris praised the successful recent work on “quickfixes” in Scala 2. “I’m amazed how easy it is to trigger a quickfix and it makes me so happy every time it works.” This connects to the Scalafix discussion because quickfixes and Scalafix overlap in purpose, and the compiler has information about user code that Scalafix may not.
Scala 2 report
This was presented by Seth.
At the time of the meeting, 2.12.19 was at the release-candidate stage, 2.13.13 was almost there, and the following forum threads were open for discussing the contents and timing of the two impending releases:
After the meeting, the following threads were opened to discuss the next releases:
The technical highlight of 2.13.13 is the introduction of
-Xsource:3-cross as an alternative to -Xsource:3; the former is
for crossbuilding, the latter for migration.
Community report
Eugene led some brief discussion about the health of various segments of the community (Spark users, Typelevel, ZIO, Akka, and so forth).
He also noted that his experience with co-organizing Scala Matsuri is that times are currently tough for conference organizers, especially in seeking sponsorship, likely because the job market in IT generally is weak, and sponsorship money is often motivated by recruiting.
Darja said that she’s very encouraged by all the signs she’s seeing that conference and meetup activity are reviving, post-pandemic.
Eugene also updated us on the health of the sbt plugin ecosystem. Many plugins have changed owners, dormant plugins are being revived, and many are now publishing to Maven Central. The Play and Pekko projects are among the drivers of this work.
Chris asked the Center if a second community representative has been found yet. Darja says that a strong candidate has emerged and will hopefully join next quarter.
Management and financial report
This was presented by Darja. Her report centered on fundraising. The Center is in need of new money, as a number of board members bowed out in 2023. The Center is pursuing various potential funding prospects. It seems that times are tough all over for open source funding. As part of bringing new members on board, some adjustments to the charter may be proposed, for example, to flexibly accommodate different sizes of company. Details remain to be seen.
For practical reasons, and to the Center’s regret, there is little likelihood of Scala Days happening in 2024. The Center is highly optimistic that it can be revived in 2025; doing that is a high priority. (There was a long discussion about various ways this might hypothetically play out.)
There was also some discussion of what online services the Center should be using for publicity. One theme that came up is that some venues are better suited for interaction with the community, others best used only to broadcast announcements.
Conclusion
We talked about what upcoming conferences we might see each other at, otherwise, see you online!