Scala Native

Thanks, I know what hard realtime means, I just meant I didn't have experience with those systems to really debate about them. Do you have practical experience building hard realtime systems?

> As an aside, I expect for many things native Scala will equal C++ in performance

Are you familiar with Haskell performance?

> [can Haskell be used for] realtime simulations and games?

Yes.

As I said, I can't speak for hard realtime, but then again, most sims and games seldom require it.

> GC based languages in general aren't good choices for the types of systems discussed above.

You seem to be arguing out of theory (which is why I asked you if you were speaking from experience). We're also not discussing GC based languages "in general"; we are discussing Haskell, which is a very practical language which can and has been used successfully in a variety of real-world applications, and which qualifies as a general purpose language. If in doubt, talk to an actual Haskell practitioner instead of arguing out of theoretical positions, and you'll be surprised. Many such practitioners frequent HN, and I'm sure they are eager (no pun intended) to discuss the systems they've worked in.

For that matter, will Scala Native not be a GC language?

> Scala also supports mutable state and the OO paradigm if they are better or more convenient for a particular system.

As I argued before, in practice this means Scala is not a great language for OOP or FP. It's understandable that experienced practitioners of either style will prefer cleaner & better languages.

I don't predict a particularly great outcome for Scala outside the JVM, since I think the JVM is its main selling point. Once you remove this point, other languages become distractingly attractive :)

Sorry, I didn't see your question before. I don't know if you'll see my answer now, but here is what I dislike about SBT:

- It's unclear whether SBT wants you to write build.sbt or build.scala project files. It's recommended you use build.sbt by default, but I've seen plenty of "simple" projects, sometimes examples but often templates generated by tools, which default to build.scala. And now I've read build.scala is deprecated...

- The syntax of build.sbt is confusing. Is it Scala? Is it a DSL? Knowing Scala is certainly not enough to understand SBT (even for build.scala files!), but if I remember correctly one of its selling points was that it was "just Scala".

- Let's get not started about build files for build files...

- The structure of the file is confusing. I never know when defining a key is going to work or not. There seem to be tons of ways of doing something, which is fine in a general-purpose language but undesirable in a configuration format!

- The many third-party plugins are confusing to configure and are often poorly documented, which reminds me of Maven's discouraging "plugin hell"... I don't think I've ever seen a plugin for Maven which was adequately documented, which means you end up copying someone else's configuration without fully understanding it. I fear SBT is the same.

- Neither IntelliJ nor Scala IDE are entirely happy compiling SBT's project files. Thankfully the support has gotten better, but it's not 100% there yet. This used to be maddening in the recent past; a "compiled" project file which your IDE fails to properly understand is unusable!

thanks!