Friction-less Scala

Read about our commitment to the development of Scala 3 and its ecosystem.

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“Friction is the resistance to motion of one object moving relative to another.”

Exactly one year ago, Martin Odersky joined our company as an external advisor which resulted in our commitment to the development of Scala 3 and its ecosystem. Since then, we’ve held many discussions and planning sessions on how to make Scala the most modern and hugely popular ecosystem that is efficient and fun to use.

Our conclusion was in terms of language features that Scala 3 is almost there. As a result, we decided to focus on what we have been successfully doing for many years for our clients: improving the developer environment. Using Scala should be as efficient and easy as possible, allowing you to quickly “get the job done” or simply… bring a smile to a programmer’s face!

To achieve this, we’ve set our sights on any aspect of the environment that causes friction — where friction is anything that might distract you from being focused on your work.

Therefore, we have started a long-running campaign to remove as much friction from the Scala ecosystem as possible.

Progress report

Our plan is simple: to find and name the areas where developers experience friction, and start projects to address these pain points.

During the ScalaCon in April, we shared the following roadmap:

Today, I am happy to report good progress!

1. We continue to develop scaladoc to provide a better documentation platform.

2. The most visible results are the snippet compiler and the interactive by-signature search (a’la Hoogle):

3. Alexandre Archambault, creator of Coursier, has joined our team, and together we are working together to drastically lower the bar for learning Scala in terms of tooling. We plan to announce the first results in the near future, so stay tuned!

Tell us what is stopping you!

Our first roadmap was composed internally and was based on dozens of conversations, and the wealth of experiences of more than 70 Scala developers working in VirtusLab. That being said, we are aware that this does not represent the whole community, so we ask for your help!

Below, we’ve compiled a list of pain points so please upvote problems below that affect your daily life. We’ve missed many for sure so let us know by using this form!

What is causing friction in your day-to-day life with Scala?

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Written by

Krzysztof Romanowski
Krzysztof Romanowski Head of Scala/Dev Tooling Aug 10, 2021