Minutes of the 33rd meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2024
Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.
Summary
The meeting took place towards the end of Q3, so we considered it to be a combined meeting (with a combined report) covering both Q2 and Q3.
Center activities for the past two quarters focused on maintaining
and improving Scala 3, the adoption of Scala CLI as the new
scala command, the WebAssembly backend for Scala.js, the
Scala Improvement Process, the Scala Toolkit, the Metals debugger,
Scaladex, sbt 2, documentation, Google Summer of Code, compiler
sprees, fundraising, and more.
Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:
Two new proposals were received:
- SCP-032: Provide guidance on choosing between Scala LTS and Next
- SCP-033: Deprecate Eclipse Scala IDE
Both proposals were accepted by the board (and both were later completed, in October).
Other topics covered included the long-term future of the Center.
Date, Time and Location
The meeting took place at EPFL over two full days: Thursday and Friday, September 5-6, 2024.
Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary) with the aid of Valérie Meillaud (Scala Center).
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:
- Zainab Ali, community representative
- Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab (substituting for Krzysztof Borowski)
- Dmitrii Naumenko, JetBrains
- Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
- Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Guests:
- James Belsey, Morgan Stanley
- Damian Mazurkiewicz, SiriusXM
- Valérie Meillaud, Scala Center
Apologies:
- Eugene Yokota, community representative
Introduction
This special in-person meeting lasted two full days.
Technical report
Seb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q2+Q3 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.
An officer asked if there are still still two Bloops; Seb said no, that work is now completed on re-merging the fork that Scala CLI had been using.
There was some discussion about IntelliJ support for Scala-CLI. (There is already some, and it is expected to improve. One particular area that hadn’t been addressed yet at meeting time was folders full of independent scripts.)
A board member asked if build pipelining would be enabled by default in sbt. Seb said perhaps eventually, but they aren’t sufficiently confident in the quality yet.
An officer asked who’s running SIP (the Scala Improvement Process) now, with Toli having left the Center. It’s Dimi Racordon from Martin’s lab now; the web page will be updated to reflect that.
A board member asked if there is a timeline when the first sbt 2 beta is expected. Seb said first half of 2025 is plausible but later in the year is likelier. There was some inconclusive discussion about the status of the build caching feature and whether that should be considered a blocker.
A board member asked about whether sbt plugins will be able to cross-compile for sbt 1 and sbt 2, or whether they’d have to branch. Seb said cross-compiling will be supported.
There was some discussion about adoption of Scala 3 at a company with a significant number of Scala developers. They are now using Scala 3 features heavily, not just compiling old 2 code with the 3 compiler. It was emphasized that good IntelliJ support is of critical importance.
Scala 2 report
This was presented by Lukas.
Lukas said that the main themes are still aligning with Scala 3,
warnings and lints especially under -Xsource:3. Some improvements
shipped in 2.13.14, further changes coming in 2.13.15.
About SIP-51, Seth noted that 2.13.15 didn’t break forward bincompat yet but 2.13.16 might. (In the end, it got pushed off to 2.13.17.)
Community report
This section was led by Zainab. (Eugene was unable to attend.)
Discussion centered on meetups and hack days (or “sprees”), including how the pandemic set meetups and conferences back severely, and how recovery has been progressing.
SCP-032: Provide guidance on choosing between Scala LTS and Next
The text of Zainab’s proposal is here:
- SCP-032: Provide guidance on choosing between Scala LTS and Next
Discussion was brief, since the board sees the need, but there wasn’t yet a draft text available to give feedback on.
We neglected to hold a formal vote after the discussion, but we confirmed with the board afterwards that the proposal should be considered accepted by acclaim.
(Later, in October 2024, the proposal was considered completed with the publication of this page.)
SCP-033: Deprecate Eclipse Scala IDE
The text of Zainab’s proposal is here:
- SCP-033: Deprecate Eclipse Scala IDE
The proposal was discussed by the board. An officer asked what the old site would redirect to. Seth said that scala-lang.org will soon have a new page dedicated specifically to Scala IDEs (namely IntelliJ and Metals) and the site will redirect to that.
We neglected to hold a formal vote after the discussion, but we confirmed with the board afterwards that the proposal should be considered accepted by acclaim.
(Later, in October 2024, the proposal was considered completed.)
Management report
Darja began by reflecting on the Center’s experiences over the past eight years, both its successes and accomplishments, and things that might change over the next eight years. She also updated the board on the budget situation and in-progress fundraising efforts.
Discussion ensued about the Center’s role, mission, structure, and long-term future.
One theme that emerged was a desire for the Center to improve communication about everything going on under the Scala umbrella, not just at the Center itself, but also at LAMP, Akka, VirtusLab, and our collaborators. (After the meeting, this discussion led to the creation of new “Scala Highlights” newsletter; the first issue was published in February 2025.)
There was also discussion about the Center’s plans to revive Scala Days in 2025. (Later, after the meeting, plans were finalized and August 2025 dates were announced.)
Conclusion
The next meeting will be held online in January 2025 (or February, if necessary).