[PoC] Scala Report - January 2025 #6
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| title: Highlights From Scala - January 2025 | ||
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| This year, we’re excited to share key updates across the Scala ecosystem, showcasing advancements in performance, usability, and developer experience. |
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this could be clearer about the period of time covered, I think. is the intent for the first installment to cover all of 2024, or just the 4th quarter?
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Since it is the first of its kind, I think it make sense to cover all of 2024.
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| category: blog-detail | ||
| post-type: blog | ||
| by: Scala Core Team |
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maybe "the Scala organization"? because it's not just the Center, but it's not just the core team, either?
| by: Scala Core Team | ||
| title: Highlights From Scala - January 2025 | ||
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perhaps open by saying what this is, how often it will be published, why we're doing it? I think it could be quite brief
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I drafted this as introduction:
Welcome to the first edition of **Scala Highlights**, a newsletter we plan to publish quarterly to showcase technical achievements, successful community events, and new online resources.
This inaugural issue is special as it offers a recap of 2024, celebrating the year's most significant advancements , and their impact on the Scala ecosystem.
Here are some of the standout highlights covered in this edition:
- Scala CLI as the new default runner for Scala
- Experimental WebAssembly backend in Scala.js
- Multi-threading support in Scala Native
- sbt 2.x beta release with Scala 3 support in build definition
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| Here’s what’s new: | ||
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| - [Scala 3.5](#scala-35) introduces binary integer literals, named tuples, and an experimental syntax for context bounds. |
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didn't Scala 3.6 come out, too? (or is the intent to do 3.5 in this newsletter and 3.6 in the next?)
add:
- Scala 2 releases add JDK 23 support, improvements to
-Xsource:3(including a new-Xsource-featuresoption for customizing its behavior), and improvements to errors and warnings and linting
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So this is not the draft of the real report, it is a quick POC I did in december to show how it could like. The real report is yet to be written.
| - Add sources of synthetic classes to source jar ([3.5.1](https://github.com/scala/scala3/releases/tag/3.5.1)) | ||
| - Add the -Wall option that enables all warnings ([3.5.2](https://github.com/scala/scala3/releases/tag/3.5.2)) | ||
| - Add origin filter to WConf, DeprecationWarning ([3.5.2](https://github.com/scala/scala3/releases/tag/3.5.2)) | ||
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add:
Scala 2 releases
We published Scala 2.13.15 and 2.12.20. As usual, Scala 2 maintenance is focused on compatibility, bugfixes, aligning with Scala 3, and supporting migration to Scala 3.
Both releases were updated to work on JDK 23.
Scala 2.13.15 includes improvements to -Xsource:3, such as a new -Xsource-features option for customizing its behavior. We also made many improvements to errors, warnings, and linting.
For details, see:
The future of Scala 2
In December, we expanded the Scala development guarantees page to cover Scala 2. In summary, it says:
- Maintenance of Scala 2.13 will continue indefinitely.
- Minimal maintenance of Scala 2.12 will continue as long as sbt 1 remains in wide use.
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| ## Scala.js | ||
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| ### Experimental: WebAssembly Backend |
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| ### Experimental: WebAssembly Backend | |
| ### Experimental: WebAssembly back end |
| - Completions for implicit classes ([v1.3.0](https://scalameta.org/metals/blog/2024/04/15/thalium)) | ||
| - Bloop 2 (([v1.4.0](https://scalameta.org/metals/blog/2024/10/24/palladium))) | ||
| - Detect custom mains (([v1.4.0](https://scalameta.org/metals/blog/2024/10/24/palladium))) | ||
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as it stands, the newsletter is heavily focused on
- technical improvements to our software (rather than other activities such as community management and events)
- work that is completed, rather than work that is in progress or planned
- our own software, at the expense of that developed by others, such as IntelliJ
not sure how intentional these are
perhaps we could add some short sections here. a "Community and events" section could include such things as:
- we overhauled our governance and published new website additions and a blog post about it
- we launched the Scala Ambassadors program
- we are actively working on organizing Scala Days for fall 2025 and hope to make a more definite announcement before long
- recent Scala conferences that occurred included X, Y, and Z, with links to the published talk videos
- upcoming Scala conferences are listed at our site's events page, plus we could highlight the Scalac events calendar which covers meetups too
- we could highlight what Scala Space is doing, they're really pumping out videos and such
as for covering other people's software, I would suggest inviting IntellIJ to contribute a section. To Scala users, they don't really care that Metals is from us and IntelliJ is from them, it's all equally important. Anyway, JetBrains is a member of the Scala Center advisory board and I would suggest we reward them for that by highlighting them here.
as for work that is planned, as opposed to completed,
- are there some roadmaps we could link to?
- how linking to all in-progress SIPs, with a brief statement on their status?
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not sure how intentional these are
Yes, my intention is to keep the newsletter low-effort for us, and easily reproducible every quarter. The main idea is to compile what's already available here and there, rather than creating new content.
perhaps we could add some short sections here. a "Community and events" section could include such things as:
Indeed that would be nice to have somewhere. However, in this context, I worry it might get lost among the technical updates. Maybe it deserves more visibility, in its own blog post: Highlights from 2024: Community and events. Would you volunteer to write it?
as for covering other people's software, I would suggest inviting IntellIJ to contribute a section. To Scala users, they don't really care that Metals is from us and IntelliJ is from them, it's all equally important. Anyway, JetBrains is a member of the Scala Center advisory board and I would suggest we reward them for that by highlighting them here.
That's a really good point. I'll reach out to them and invite them to contribute.
are there some roadmaps we could link to?
Currently, we don't have any public roadmap for 2024. Perhaps we can include links to our roadmaps in the Q1 newsletter.
how linking to all in-progress SIPs, with a brief statement on their status?
Should it be a blog post on its own? We used to have something similar but it was discontinued.
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This helps — I've been thinking of the newsletter as one-stop-shopping for various kinds of news, but it seems your vision is a bit different. Let's discuss tomorrow. (I'm certainly mindful of the need to keep the effort level reasonable...!)
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This one feels a bit special since it's the first issue, and I see it more as a recap of 2024. That said, if we pack too much content, I’m worried it might feel overwhelming.
In contrast, for the Q1 newsletter, focusing solely on technical achievements might leave us short on material. Adding a broader mix of news, like "Community and Events," would probably make it more engaging.
This is a proof of concept of the Scala Report. Not to be merged.