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Scala 2.12.0 is now available

scala-lang.org

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Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#31

Post by rahilb »

redtuesday wrote: post #30
Philipp__ wrote: post #11

What grabbed my attention the most in terms of Scala is Dotty. New compiler for Scala, who's main goal is simplification and reorganization of language. You know it will be for real when even Martin is working on it! This language has bright future. Edit: grammar, sry.

> This language has bright future. Yeah, it definitely looks good (to me). Dotty looks really promising to a layman like me especially since it's based on the machine-checked DOT calculus, so should have a better foundation than scalac. Then there are big projects like Spark, Akka, Play etc. But what I like the most about Scala at the moment is the continued effort regarding Scala.js, which seems to be one of the bes…

>continued effort regarding Scala.js

It's a shame the documentation is so poor for scalajs.

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#32

Post by sjrd »

rahilb wrote: post #31
redtuesday wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This language has bright future. Yeah, it definitely looks good (to me). Dotty looks really promising to a layman like me especially since it's based on the machine-checked DOT calculus, so should have a better foundation than scalac. Then there are big projects like Spark, Akka, Play etc. But what I like the most about Scala at the moment is the continued effort regarding Scala.js, which seems to be one of the bes…

>continued effort regarding Scala.js It's a shame the documentation is so poor for scalajs.

Could you elaborate on specific points that would require improvements? Most feedback I receive says it's good. If those of you who think it's poor only tell us "it's poor", there is nothing we can do to improve it.

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#33

Post by doikor »

denis1 wrote: post #24
Philipp__ wrote: post #11

What grabbed my attention the most in terms of Scala is Dotty. New compiler for Scala, who's main goal is simplification and reorganization of language. You know it will be for real when even Martin is working on it! This language has bright future. Edit: grammar, sry.

Well Martin also worked on scalac, with all its warts & problems, so you can't say that it will be better just because he's also working on it. :) IMO much more important is the fact that Dotty is being developed after several years and iterations of scalac. Ideally this would mean that the problems to be solved, and the different ways to solve them are known. Dotty can do this without having a large legacy inherited…

I think one of the best things about Dotty is that they now have a proven theory that the language works on top of (DOT calculus http://scala-lang.org/blog/2016/02/03/essence-of-scala.html). This has allowed them to remove some unsound things (and work around others in a sound way)

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#35

Post by amelius »

Offtopic. Does anybody know of a practical imperative language in which promises are implicit? Often, when writing software, it happens that deeply nested functions suddenly have to return a promise instead of a direct value, and this forces the programmer to rewrite all the callers of that function into dealing with promises, which of course sucks. So it would be better if the programming language would do that rewriting instead (under the hood), so to speak.

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#36

Post by pjmlp »

bad_user wrote: post #5

This is the version of Scala that breaks compatibility with Java 6 in the generated bytecode, by making use of Java 8's features, like invokedynamic, default interface methods and integration with SAM types. This is great because the generated bytecode is smaller and more resistant to binary compatibility issues. Scala has had problems with binary compatibility because its features don't map that well on top of the J…

> the world is not ready to fully commit to Java 8, as sadly there are projects like Android that are holding us back.

This is only going to get worse after Java 9 and 10 get released.

I imagine by the time we get Java 10, Google might be considering to eventually cherry pick Java 9 features.

They just forked the whole eco-system, and lots of people blindly post links to their Java 8 references, without looking into Android source code, where they are just cherry picking Java 8 features, JVM bytecodes and libraries.

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#37

Post by paulddraper »

bad_user wrote: post #5

This is the version of Scala that breaks compatibility with Java 6 in the generated bytecode, by making use of Java 8's features, like invokedynamic, default interface methods and integration with SAM types. This is great because the generated bytecode is smaller and more resistant to binary compatibility issues. Scala has had problems with binary compatibility because its features don't map that well on top of the J…

Weird to blame current Scala versions for not supporting end of life versions.

You can still use Java 6 and Scala 2.11.

It's just that Java 6 will not receive any bug fixes or security updates, and Scala 2.11 will not either. But both will continue to work.

Seems very sane to me.

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#38

Post by bad_user »

paulddraper wrote: post #37
bad_user wrote: post #5

This is the version of Scala that breaks compatibility with Java 6 in the generated bytecode, by making use of Java 8's features, like invokedynamic, default interface methods and integration with SAM types. This is great because the generated bytecode is smaller and more resistant to binary compatibility issues. Scala has had problems with binary compatibility because its features don't map that well on top of the J…

Weird to blame current Scala versions for not supporting end of life versions. You can still use Java 6 and Scala 2.11. It's just that Java 6 will not receive any bug fixes or security updates, and Scala 2.11 will not either. But both will continue to work. Seems very sane to me.

> Weird to blame current Scala versions for not supporting end of life versions.

I didn't.

> will not receive any bug fixes or security updates, and Scala 2.11 will not either

Oh, I'm pretty sure that Scala 2.11 will receive fixes, security updates and even backports of features for a very long time. For example SI-2712 is getting back-ported to Scala 2.11.9 and there's even talk of back-porting it to Scala 2.10.

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#39

Post by taude »

ThePawnBreak wrote: post #14

Does anyone have any tips for learning Scala? I want to learn the language, it looks very interesting, and I have some familiarity with Scheme, Haskell and Ocaml, but I just don't know how to start. What should I read? What should I build?

I've always been a Bruce Eckel fan. This book he wrote Atomic Scala [1] is easy to read and digest.

[1] http://www.atomicscala.com/

Re: Scala 2.12.0 is now available

#40

Post by dragandj »

amelius wrote: post #35

Offtopic. Does anybody know of a practical imperative language in which promises are implicit? Often, when writing software, it happens that deeply nested functions suddenly have to return a promise instead of a direct value, and this forces the programmer to rewrite all the callers of that function into dealing with promises, which of course sucks. So it would be better if the programming language would do that rewr…

You are literally describing monads.
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