Minutes of the 34th meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2024

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, the Scala 3 language specification, Scala.js maintenance, the Scala Improvement Process, sbt 2, the new Scala Highlights newsletter, Google of Summer Code, Scala Advent of Code, compiler sprees, Scala Days, and fundraising.

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

One new proposal was received this quarter:

After discussion, the board decided to postpone any formal vote on it.

Other topics covered included officer elections; officers remained unchanged.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 16:15 (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

The company formerly known as Lightbend is now called Akka. Lukas Rytz is still the Akka representative, but he was unavailable for this meeting so Seth filled in.

Officers:

  • Chris Kipp (chairperson), community
  • Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
  • Sébastien Doeraene (interim technical director), EPFL
  • Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
  • Seth Tisue (secretary), Akka

Board members:

  • Zainab Ali, community representative
  • Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab (substituting for Krzysztof Borowski)
  • Dmitrii Naumenko, JetBrains
  • Seth Tisue, Akka (substituting for Lukas Rytz)
  • Eugene Yokota, community representative

Apologies:

  • Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley

Technical report

Séb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q4 quarterly activity report:

And the Center’s 2025 Q1 roadmap:

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

Séb noted that at its current staffing level the Center is currently doing at least as much organizing and community work as technical work.

A board member asked where Scala.js’s WebAssembly back end stands. Séb said that optimizing the back end is still pending. Closures in particular are not optimized yet. Martin added that stable exceptions support in WebAssembly in browsers is another pending issue preventing the Center’s work on this from being quite ready yet for use in common scenarios.

There was some technical discussion about how the Scala 3 debugger would be packaged to be consumed by IntelliJ and other tools. Also, an officer asked about the debugger code moving into the main Scala 3 repo; does that mean that fixes require a new language release? Séb said yes, but that code is now stable enough now for it to be worth it.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Seth.

Scala Newsletter is out today, and covers both Scala 3 and Scala 2. Let us know what you think, as this will be the template for future issues, which will be published quarterly.

Since the last meeting, we published a blog post about our Scala 2 maintenance plans. Note that 2.12 is now under minimal maintenance.

Scala 2.13.15 and 2.13.16 came out since the last meeting. Changes were modest and focused on compatibility, on supporting Scala 3 migration, and on improvements to warnings and linting. There have been no 2.13.16 regression reports, so if anyone was holding back on upgrading, I’d say go ahead.

As usual, we’ve opened threads on the Contributors forum for discussing plans for the next releases:

We plan for SIP-51 (resuming making additions to the standard library) to be a theme for 2.13.17.

An officer asked: if the primary motivation for maintaining 2.12 is sbt 1, does that mean that when sbt 2 comes out, 2.12 be EOLed? Seth responded: perhaps eventually, but not right away. We are assuming a longer timeframe since sbt 1 will remain in wide use for some time yet to come, even once sbt 2 is available.

SCP-034: Artifact publishing

Eugene summarized the proposal.

Séb expressed support; “it seems like a sensible thing to do”. One board member wondered if maintainers would be sufficiently motivated to migrate to a shared implementation. Another member asked if there’s a particular current implementation that would be the basis of the shared one; there was no simple, single answer.

The rest of the discussion centered on whether the Center would have enough engineering resources this year to lead this. In the end, the board decided not to formally vote on it now, but revisit the proposal later. Chris suggested that Eugene amend the proposal to reflect today’s discussion.

Elections

For chairperson, Chris Kipp indicated his willingness to continue as chair and was elected unanimously. (Chairs are not required to serve past one year, but a willing chair is welcome to serve for longer.)

Also re-elected without any other nominations being made were Martin Odersky (technical advisor) and Seth Tisue (secretary).

Community report

This section was led by Zainab and Eugene.

Zainab said the London community is currently strong, with more events occurring, with attendance up as well. The London Scala group is now doing open-source hack days and women-in-Scala meetings, in addition to the usual meetups with speakers. ScalaBridge has received feedback that it could devote more time to setup and tooling, as that usually causes participants more trouble than the language itself.

Eugene noted that X (aka Twitter) is no longer as universal a source of news and discussion; some users remain but others have dispersed to Bluesky and/or Mastodon. He said that as a result, the Scala Reddit is even more important to the community than before, and the discussions and engagement there have been strong recently (including topics about education and training).

He also observed that there have been several extremely active language design discussions recently, such as the one about collection literals. There was some discussion among the board about how these proposals and discussions can best be framed and structured, to encourage high quality engagement and ensure that people feel heard.

There was some also some discussion on how to better coordinate language changes with tooling maintainers, including the recent introduction of the concept of “preview” features as an intermediate state between “experimental” and completed.

One board member expressed a wish for Scala people (perhaps even Center members) to more present at non-Scala conferences, representing Scala outside of our own community.

There was some discussion around how having a smaller engineering staff may change community perception of the Center. There was general agreement that our publicity should focus on what advances are happening and not too much on exactly where they happened (except, of course, to give credit where credit is due!). That’s part of the idea behind the new Scala Highlights newsletter, which is assembled by the Center, but isn’t restricted to presenting the Center’s own activities.

Management and financial report

Darja said that a major piece of news since the last meeting was the publication in October of the new Scala governance and “development guarantees” documents, as described in this blog post.

Also very important, the publication of the first issue of Scala Highlights. The first issue covers all of 2024; future issues will have quarterly news.

The Center’s finances have improved thanks to one-time donations and assistance from several sources. Regardless, hiring additional staff would require additional funding. Fundraising efforts are ongoing.

The Center is also still in the process of reviving Scala Days for later in 2025. (Later, after the meeting, plans were finalized and August 2025 dates were announced.)

Conclusion

The next meeting will be held online, probably in April. If possible, a late-summer or fall meeting will be held in-person at EPFL.