Scala Center at EPFL

February 5 2025

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0100

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:

report

One new proposal was received this quarter:

SCP-034: Artifact publishing

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:

report

And the Center’s 2025 Q1 roadmap:

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.

September 5 2024

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 33rd meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2024

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The meeting took place towards the end of Q3, so we considered it to be a combined meeting (with a combined report) covering both Q2 and Q3.

Center activities for the past two quarters focused on maintaining and improving Scala 3, the adoption of Scala CLI as the new scala command, the WebAssembly backend for Scala.js, the Scala Improvement Process, the Scala Toolkit, the Metals debugger, Scaladex, sbt 2, documentation, Google Summer of Code, compiler sprees, fundraising, and more.

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

report

Two new proposals were received:

SCP-032: Provide guidance on choosing between Scala LTS and Next
SCP-033: Deprecate Eclipse Scala IDE

Both proposals were accepted by the board (and both were later completed, in October).

Other topics covered included the long-term future of the Center.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place at EPFL over two full days: Thursday and Friday, September 5-6, 2024.

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary) with the aid of Valérie Meillaud (Scala Center).

Attendees

Officers:

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

Board members:

Zainab Ali, community representative
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab (substituting for Krzysztof Borowski)
Dmitrii Naumenko, JetBrains
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley

Guests:

James Belsey, Morgan Stanley
Damian Mazurkiewicz, SiriusXM
Valérie Meillaud, Scala Center

Apologies:

Eugene Yokota, community representative

Introduction

This special in-person meeting lasted two full days.

Technical report

Seb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q2+Q3 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:

roadmap

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

An officer asked if there are still still two Bloops; Seb said no, that work is now completed on re-merging the fork that Scala CLI had been using.

There was some discussion about IntelliJ support for Scala-CLI. (There is already some, and it is expected to improve. One particular area that hadn’t been addressed yet at meeting time was folders full of independent scripts.)

A board member asked if build pipelining would be enabled by default in sbt. Seb said perhaps eventually, but they aren’t sufficiently confident in the quality yet.

An officer asked who’s running SIP (the Scala Improvement Process) now, with Toli having left the Center. It’s Dimi Racordon from Martin’s lab now; the web page will be updated to reflect that.

A board member asked if there is a timeline when the first sbt 2 beta is expected. Seb said first half of 2025 is plausible but later in the year is likelier. There was some inconclusive discussion about the status of the build caching feature and whether that should be considered a blocker.

A board member asked about whether sbt plugins will be able to cross-compile for sbt 1 and sbt 2, or whether they’d have to branch. Seb said cross-compiling will be supported.

There was some discussion about adoption of Scala 3 at a company with a significant number of Scala developers. They are now using Scala 3 features heavily, not just compiling old 2 code with the 3 compiler. It was emphasized that good IntelliJ support is of critical importance.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

Lukas said that the main themes are still aligning with Scala 3, warnings and lints especially under -Xsource:3. Some improvements shipped in 2.13.14, further changes coming in 2.13.15.

About SIP-51, Seth noted that 2.13.15 didn’t break forward bincompat yet but 2.13.16 might. (In the end, it got pushed off to 2.13.17.)

Community report

This section was led by Zainab. (Eugene was unable to attend.)

Discussion centered on meetups and hack days (or “sprees”), including how the pandemic set meetups and conferences back severely, and how recovery has been progressing.

SCP-032: Provide guidance on choosing between Scala LTS and Next

The text of Zainab’s proposal is here:

SCP-032: Provide guidance on choosing between Scala LTS and Next

Discussion was brief, since the board sees the need, but there wasn’t yet a draft text available to give feedback on.

We neglected to hold a formal vote after the discussion, but we confirmed with the board afterwards that the proposal should be considered accepted by acclaim.

(Later, in October 2024, the proposal was considered completed with the publication of this page.)

SCP-033: Deprecate Eclipse Scala IDE

The text of Zainab’s proposal is here:

SCP-033: Deprecate Eclipse Scala IDE

The proposal was discussed by the board. An officer asked what the old site would redirect to. Seth said that scala-lang.org will soon have a new page dedicated specifically to Scala IDEs (namely IntelliJ and Metals) and the site will redirect to that.

We neglected to hold a formal vote after the discussion, but we confirmed with the board afterwards that the proposal should be considered accepted by acclaim.

(Later, in October 2024, the proposal was considered completed.)

Management report

Darja began by reflecting on the Center’s experiences over the past eight years, both its successes and accomplishments, and things that might change over the next eight years. She also updated the board on the budget situation and in-progress fundraising efforts.

Discussion ensued about the Center’s role, mission, structure, and long-term future.

One theme that emerged was a desire for the Center to improve communication about everything going on under the Scala umbrella, not just at the Center itself, but also at LAMP, Akka, VirtusLab, and our collaborators. (After the meeting, this discussion led to the creation of new “Scala Highlights” newsletter; the first issue was published in February 2025.)

There was also discussion about the Center’s plans to revive Scala Days in 2025. (Later, after the meeting, plans were finalized and August 2025 dates were announced.)

Conclusion

The next meeting will be held online in January 2025 (or February, if necessary).

April 25 2024

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 32nd meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2024

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

We were joined by two new board members, Dmitrii Naumenko (JetBrains) and Zainab Ali (community representative).

Center activities for the past quarter focused on pipelined compilation (Scala 3), TASTy Reader (Scala 2), Scala.js minifier (2 and 3), WebAssembly backend for Scala.js (2 and 3), Metals debugger (2 and 3), presentation compiler (3), sbt 2.x (2 and 3), the Scala Ambassadors initiative, Google Summer of Code, conferences (Scala.IO and Scalar), compiler sprees, combating Scala website scammers, and fundraising.

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

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other topics covered included Scala Days community discussions around “lean Scala” and “direct style” and related concepts, Scala LTS vs. Scala Next, the Scala Native 0.5 upgrade, and more.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Friday, April 25, 2024 at 15:00 (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

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

Board members:

Zainab Ali, community representative
Krzysztof Borowski, VirtusLab
Dmitrii Naumenko, JetBrains
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Apologies:

Michel Davit, Spotify

Introduction

Our two new board members introduced themselves.

Dmitrii Naumenko will represent JetBrains, who have just finished joining the board. Dmitrii is the leader of the IntelliJ Scala plugin team there.

Zainab Ali is a new community representative, serving alongside Eugene Yokota. She has been organizing the London Scala Users Group for the last five years or so. She describes herself as a functional Scala developer who does training in the functional space.

Technical report

Seb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q1 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q2 roadmap:

roadmap

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

(No questions were asked about Seb’s updates, so there are no further notes here.)

Management and financial report

Darja presented this section.

In February, the Center published their 2024 roadmap.

The Center published two blog posts about scammers targeting Scala users:

https://scala-lang.org/blog/2024/03/01/fake-scala-courses.html
https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2024/03/18/scam-response.html

Combating these scams consumed considerable time and effort, but the good news is that the scamming activity did stop.

At the Scalar conference in Warsaw, the Center organized a meeting of conference and meetup organizers and also launched the new Scala Ambassadors program.

The Center’s participation in Google Summer of Code for 2024 is moving ahead.

The Center’s moderation team met in person in Lausanne to share knowledge and experiences and to discuss and strategize.

The Center’s governance project made progress which Darja summarized. That work was eventually completed later in the year, as described in this October 2024 blog post:

https://www.scala-lang.org/news/new-governance.html

Several engineers completed their time at the Center and moved on: Anatolii Kmetiuk, Jamie Thompson, and Jedrzej Rochala. Seb will be teaching part-time at EPFL, so his effort level at the Center will be reduced to 50%. Hiring new engineers would require new funding.

The Center’s 2024 roadmap reflects the smaller size of the engineering team. Center staff will travel less unless the travel is sponsored. The Center will continue to “support, empower, and amplify” active Scala communities and community members to accomplish things that the Center itself cannot.

The Center continues to collect income from its MOOCs, but the amount continues to gradually decline.

Fundraising efforts are ongoing. Multiple leads are being pursued.

The effort to revive Scala Days for 2025 is ongoing. In the meantime, the Scala website’s events page is kept up to date with upcoming events.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

Since the last meeting, Scala 2.12.19 and 2.13.13 were released, and 2.13.14 is almost ready. The 2.13.14 cycle was short because of a few regressions. 2.13.14 introduces -Xsource-features.

Lukas contributed an sbt PR, now merged, which aligns sbt with SIP-51, which will allow the Scala 2.13 standard library (which is also used by Scala 3) to make additions again. A process for that will need to be set up.

Community report

This section was led by Eugene and Zainab.

They said that in the community there is a great deal of discussion, some confusion and uncertainty, and even some tension around the following complex of issues and developments: effect systems, the advent of Project Loom, the concept of “direct style”, and Martin’s blog post about “lean Scala”. Discussion involving nearly the entire board ensued.

Eugene said there was also some confusion in the community about Scala LTS vs Scala Next. As will be described in the next minutes, Zainab later submitted a proposal asking the Center to provide clearer public guidance on this, and that proposal was completed by the publication of this new page.

Zainab praised the organizers gathering at Scalar in Warsaw in March, which was “useful” in strengthening networking between conference and meetup organizers. In London they are hoping to do even more events besides just talks, such as workshops, open-source sprees, and katas. She also expressed hope that the Center’s new Scala Ambassadors initiative will help onboard people who want to get more involved with community.

Zainab mentioned that pushing the Scala Native 0.4 to 0.5 upgrade through the open source ecosystem has been difficult. In response, Seb recalled when Scala.js went from 0.6 to 1.0, a transition he described as “difficult and long”, yet necessary. Scala Native 0.4 was 3 to 4 years ago, so the big jump to 0.5 is now “unfortunately necessary”, but the Native team “very much hopes” that this is “the last one before 1.0”, which is probably “a few years down the line”. Eugene added that setting up a Scala.js or Scala Native community build, like the existing JVM-centric Scala 2 and Scala 3 community builds, could really help (if resources could be found for such an effort). Seth added that library maintainers shouldn’t be shy about requesting help from Scala Native enthusiasts, rather than feeling obligated to sort out problems themselves.

Conclusion

Darja intends to organize an in-person advisory board meeting to be held at EPFL in the fall. Everyone on the board indicated they would make an effort to attend. (The in-person meeting did in fact occur, in September, and it will be covered in the next minutes.)

February 7 2024

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Minutes of the 31st meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2023

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 features and compiler performance, Scala.js, the Scala Improvement Process, sbt 2, Scastie, Scala CLI, TASTy Query, Advent of Code, compiler sprees, Google Summer of Code, fundraising, and more.

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

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Tuesday, February 7, 2024 at 15:00 (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

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

Board members:

Noel Markham, Xebia Functional
Paweł Marks, VirtusLab (subbing for Krzysztof Romanowski)
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Technical report

Seb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. His remarks mainly consisted of brief highlights taken from the Center’s more detailed Q4 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:

roadmap

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

Martin offered congratulations to Eugene and the Center on getting sbt 2.x initially compiling on Scala 3. Eugene mentioned that a number of “hacks” in the sbt codebase were no longer necessary on Scala 3, and that the new macro implementations were “safer” thanks to Scala 3.

The Center declined to issue a ruling on whether Scala CLI is pronounced “Scala C.L.I.” or “Scala Clee” :-)

Chris asked about broader Scalafix improvements, as previously discussed in 2021 when SCP-027 was submitted. Seb said that hasn’t been revisited recently but they’ll take a second look if there is sufficient engineering time available this year.

Seth observed that Scalafix seems underused in the community, and although it’s not clear why. It could be because it’s not well integrated enough with tooling, and/or insufficient documentation and publicity? And do people know where to find rules?

Branching off the Scalafix discussion, Eugene observed that we don’t have good centralized documentation and recommendations on what compiler flags are available and which ones should be enabled (in general, and also in specific scenarios such as cross-building).

Chris praised the successful recent work on “quickfixes” in Scala 2. “I’m amazed how easy it is to trigger a quickfix and it makes me so happy every time it works.” This connects to the Scalafix discussion because quickfixes and Scalafix overlap in purpose, and the compiler has information about user code that Scalafix may not.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Seth.

At the time of the meeting, 2.12.19 was at the release-candidate stage, 2.13.13 was almost there, and the following forum threads were open for discussing the contents and timing of the two impending releases:

After the meeting, the following threads were opened to discuss the next releases:

The technical highlight of 2.13.13 is the introduction of -Xsource:3-cross as an alternative to -Xsource:3; the former is for crossbuilding, the latter for migration.

Community report

Eugene led some brief discussion about the health of various segments of the community (Spark users, Typelevel, ZIO, Akka, and so forth).

He also noted that his experience with co-organizing Scala Matsuri is that times are currently tough for conference organizers, especially in seeking sponsorship, likely because the job market in IT generally is weak, and sponsorship money is often motivated by recruiting.

Darja said that she’s very encouraged by all the signs she’s seeing that conference and meetup activity are reviving, post-pandemic.

Eugene also updated us on the health of the sbt plugin ecosystem. Many plugins have changed owners, dormant plugins are being revived, and many are now publishing to Maven Central. The Play and Pekko projects are among the drivers of this work.

Chris asked the Center if a second community representative has been found yet. Darja says that a strong candidate has emerged and will hopefully join next quarter.

Management and financial report

This was presented by Darja. Her report centered on fundraising. The Center is in need of new money, as a number of board members bowed out in 2023. The Center is pursuing various potential funding prospects. It seems that times are tough all over for open source funding. As part of bringing new members on board, some adjustments to the charter may be proposed, for example, to flexibly accommodate different sizes of company. Details remain to be seen.

For practical reasons, and to the Center’s regret, there is little likelihood of Scala Days happening in 2024. The Center is highly optimistic that it can be revived in 2025; doing that is a high priority. (There was a long discussion about various ways this might hypothetically play out.)

There was also some discussion of what online services the Center should be using for publicity. One theme that came up is that some venues are better suited for interaction with the community, others best used only to broadcast announcements.

Conclusion

We talked about what upcoming conferences we might see each other at, otherwise, see you online!

October 17 2023

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 30th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2023

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 compiler performance, a specification for match types, scala3-migrate, sbt, Scastie, and Scala Days in Madrid.

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

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included Scala 2, the role of the community representatives, Scala Days, the Scala blog, and officer elections.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Tuesday, October 17, 2023 at 15:00 (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Sébastien Doeraene (interim technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend
- also board member, representing Lightbend, subbing for Lukas Rytz

Board members:

Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Paweł Marks, VirtusLab (subbing for Krzysztof Romanowski)
Noel Markham, Xebia Functional (subbing for Maureen Elsberry)
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Paweł introduced himself, as it was his first time attending. He is best known to the community as the Scala 3 release officer.

Technical report

Seb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. He presented from these brief slides, which concisely show what the Center is working on:

slides

His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q3 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:

roadmap

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

Eugene suggested that the Center do more to make sure that these activities and plans are known to the community, including to “CTO level” people. Even quite short blog posts can be beneficial for this, he suggested. Seb and Darja both agreed that there should be more publicity outside of the Scala contributors forum, though it’s challenging with the current smaller team. Darja also reminded the board that posts on the Scala blog don’t always need to originate from the Center. Depending on the subject matter, posts from member companies and from the wider community are welcome.

Chris asked if the Center looks at download numbers and uses that information to help decide what to work on. Seb said yes, they do.

Eugene asked about the work on improved stack traces: is it for Scala 3 only? Seb said it works on Scala 2 as well, but the improvements are more dramatic on Scala 3, because TASTy can be used. Seth mentioned that the team at Lightbend is considering helping to bring this work to Scala 2 users.

Management report

Darja presented this section.

Scala Days Madrid was a Q3 highlight. Center staff gave three talks and sat on two panels. The Center had a booth for outreach and fundraising. In addition to co-organizing the conference itself (with Xebia Functional), the Center also co-organized associated events like ScalaBridge, the Scala open source spree, an all-day tooling summit, an in-person SIP meeting, and an advisory board (and SIP) dinner.

Scala Days allows the Center to raise awareness of the Center, meet the community, receive feedback, gather fundraising leads, and encourage community activity such as meetups.

Staff changes at the Center this quarter: Chris’s Lunatech-sponsored stint at the Center has ended. Guillaume Martres has taken a job in industry, though he will stay involved with Scala 3 compiler work part-time. These interns completed their stints: Lucas Nouguier, Ayman Lamyaghri, Shiv Verkaran. Sylvie Buchard has left the Center, after many years of part-time service; the Center has hired Valerie Meillaud to replace her (also part-time).

The rest of Darja’s remarks were about budget and fundraising. She outlined the Center’s fundraising strategy and presented worst-case and best-case budget scenarios, depending on funding. The Center will likely finish the year in the red, but it’s not clear yet by how much. In order to grow the team again, new member companies are needed. Membership regulation changes are under consideration. Some other sources of funds are also being explored. She noted that the financial climate is currently difficult industry-wide.

A board member asked about accepting direct donations from individuals. Darja said these will be accepted through the “Scala shop”, when it opens.

A board member asked about Scala 2 vs Scala 3. Could the Center’s focus on Scala 3 be a negative for fundraising, as many companies are still on Scala 2? Some discussion ensued. Note that some of the Center’s work already spans both versions, and that proposals involving Scala 2 are welcome. In its fundraising efforts, the Center could remind prospective members of this.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

Since the last meeting, Scala 2.13.12 was released, with the most notable change being support for quickfixes (aka “actionable diagnostics”). They are supported in Metals and support is coming soon in IntelliJ. The compiler can also directly apply the fixes it suggests. Another notable change is that -Xsource:3 errors can be downgraded to warnings or silenced entirely. The release also supports JDK 21, which is an LTS release.

The following forum threads are open for discussing the contents and timing of the next releases:

Chris asked about quickfixes versus Scalafix. When is it appropriate for fixes to be compiler-based versus Scalafix-based? Lukas acknowledged that there is overlap, but he noted that Scalafix is user-extensible.

Community report

Eugene said the community has largely been “peaceful”. There are encouraging signs of local meetups coming back to life in London, Tokyo, and elsewhere. The Northeast Scala Symposium has restarted and will be virtual this year. However, there is community concern about the Scala job market, especially considering that the job market industry-wide is currently challenging, given recent layoffs at many companies, including major Scala users such as Twitter. It is difficult to distinguish the climate for Scala job seekers specifically from the job market generally.

He mentioned strong ongoing community-based interest in Bazel and improvements to its Scala support.

Chris asked about the role of the community representative(s). Are they intended to represent the open-source community specifically, or the Scala community more generally? Are we doing enough to encourage proposals to be submitted through this channel? Eugene said he is interested in hearing input from everyone, but he sees his own role as representing open source primarily, since companies are free (and encouraged) to join the board instead. He also said that since the Center’s engineers can’t themselves do everything the community wants, perhaps the Center could organize working groups to help the community to self-organize to accomplish certain goals.

Several board members mentioned how crucial it is for Scala’s success (including Scala 3’s success specifically) that IntelliJ’s Scala support be high qualtiy.

Chris invited board members to share feedback about Scala Days Madrid. One board member said they were pleasantly surprised by how many new and diverse faces were present and reminded us (to general agreement) that it’s important to keep the conference a good experience for newcomers as well as veterans.

Darja invited the board to help produce content for the Scala blog. Posts don’t always have to be written by Center staff. She also mentioned the idea of using the blog to alert the community to news and posts sourced elsewhere. A board member asked about news sites such as The Scala Times and This Week in Scala; could those be carried on the Scala blog? Darja said she’d think about whether there’s a path for something like that, to help get more Scala news out to more people. Two board members mentioned the possibility of using the blog to let the community about new libraries. And it was noted that some of the Center’s activities get publicized on the contributors’ forum only but might be of wider interest.

Elections

For chairperson, Chris Kipp indicated his willingness to continue as chair and was re-elected unanimously. (Chairs are not expected to serve for longer than one year, but a willing chair is welcome to serve for longer. The chair not need be a voting board member.)

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

Conclusion

Because of December holidays, a likely time for the next meeting is early or mid January. Chris said he’ll try to schedule all of the 2024 meetings soon, rather than wait and schedule them a quarter at a time.

July 26 2023

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 29th meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2023

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 language and compiler improvements, tooling and developer experience improvements, documentation and education, and community and the contributor experience.

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

report

One new proposal was received this quarter:

SCP-031: Ensure reachability of Scala websites

The work was already completed by the Center before the meeting, and no one objected to considering it “accepted” as well as “completed”.

Other business discussed included the now-open technical director role, fundraising and crowdfunding, certifications, governance, Scala 2 release plans, and community venues such as conferences, meetups, chat rooms and forums.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, July 26, 2023 at 15:00 (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend
- also board member, representing Lightbend, subbing for Lukas Rytz

Board members:

James Belsey (Morgan Stanley) (subbing for Daniela Sfregola)
Krzysztof Borowski, VirtusLab (subbing for Krzysztof Romanowski)
Maureen Elsberry and Diego Alonso, Xebia Functional
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Krzysztof introduced himself, as (unlike the other subs) it was his first time attending.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. He presented from these slides, which concisely show what the Center is working on:

slides

His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q2 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q3 roadmap:

roadmap

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

Julien announced that he is leaving the Center soon. This is his last board meeting.

A board member asked if it is known yet who the Center’s new Technical Director will be. Answer: not known yet, but Darja will keep the board posted. In the meantime, Julien has already handed over many of his specific duties to other team members. For example, Seb will manage the MOOCs and Toli is the new SIP chair. Darja will present the technical report at the next meeting.

Management report

Darja presented this section.

She thanked Julien for his years of service to the Center. “My heart breaks that Julien is leaving. You will be missed.”

Johanna’s stint at the Center is ending and the series of six blog posts she has been working on will begin appearing soon. (A few weeks after the meeting, the first in the series, about Goldman Sachs’s open source efforts, appeared.)

Sylvie is also leaving the Center, to take a different post at EPFL. A search for a new part-time administrative assistant is in progress. (Since the meeting, a new assistant was hired, to begin work in September.)

Ayman Lamyaghri is joining the Center for a six-week internship, working on the Scala debugger.

Darja congratulated Xebia Functional for organizing a successful Scala Days conference in Seattle, with the Center’s help. Xebia is also preparing the September edition in Madrid. Several Center members traveled to North America for the first time, to speak at the conference and at two meetups in San Francisco.

Darja also discussed the Center’s fundraising efforts and strategy. New funding is needed in order to maintain the current team size into next year. Ideally enough new funding can be found to actually grow the team. The resumption of in-person conferences such as Scala Days is already proving to be a good opportunity to make contacts that we hope will lead to new board members and other forms of support for the Center. Some of this occurred in Seattle and even more will occur in Madrid.

One board member asked about crowdfunding. Could it be easier for Scala users to make a monthly donation to the Center, perhaps via Patreon or OpenCollective or a similar platform? Darja said they plan to work on that, but in the short term securing large donors is the top priority.

Another board member asked if the Center has considered offering certifications, as a revenue source. Darja said the extension school program might be a channel for doing that, but not this year.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Seth. He said that the 2.12.18 and 2.13.11 releases this quarter seem to have been well-received.

For the next releases, he mentioned the following Discourse threads that the team at Lightbend is using for planning and community input:

He said 2.13.12 could be released as soon as August, or not long after, partly to address minor regressions, but more importantly to ship the work on actionable diagnostics (or “quickfixes”) that we have been collaborating on with Eugene, JetBrains, and others. The team also continues to improve alignment with Scala 3, especially under the -Xsource:3 compiler flag. The team has noticed that more and more open source projects are leaving this flag enabled in their builds, rather than just turning it on briefly to get migration advice.

Community report

Eugene shared some thoughts about how to encourage more activity and communication in the Scala community, both online and in person. This sparked a lively and wide-ranging discussion among the board.

Eugene said there have been multiple challenges around this in recent years, notably the pandemic of course, but also Twitter’s decline as a central point for sharing, as some users have departed for Mastodon and elsewhere. “It’s currently unclear where communication in general happens.” He recalled past eras of Scala where meetups and Twitter were key for people to connect with each other, and community projects flourished as a result. Today there’s Reddit, there’s Discord, but there’s no central “what is happening” kind of place. “People are retreating into smaller circles,” their colleagues or their open-source collaborators, with less mingling with people they wouldn’t normally be in contact with. However Reddit is “a pretty good mix of people,” including new people asking questions about Scala 3, about what libraries to use, and so forth. Reddit, however, is currently being threatened with boycotts because they blocked access to third party apps.

After someone takes a Scala Center MOOC, or reads Programming in Scala, Eugene said, what to do next isn’t always clear. Maybe we could provide some guidance about projects whose source code is educational to read. The established projects are often too big, too overwhelming (for example, Lichess). Are there medium sized projects we could direct them to?

Eugene: I think it does help if there’s a place you can ask a question and the hit rate is high. Discord is pretty good for that. There’s people hanging out, and there’s people who are helpful who will try to answer sincerely. Maybe we could highlight more that the Scala Discord exists and people are hanging out there? Connecting with other people, and learning new things, that’s what makes people stick around in the community.

Seth agreed that chat on Discord (and Gitter before it) has been a real bright spot in our community in recent years. “Things have been really good there,” he said. Especially during the pandemic, it was important that we had that. But I can’t think of an action that would help. But he agreed with Eugene that meetups were also hugely important, pre-pandemic. “So many of us got involved with Scala through meetups.” So anything we can do to encourage meetups to get going again could be really helpful.

Darja said the Center is trying to foster meetups by traveling together to European cities, by train usually, and doing events. “We’ve noticed a huge enthusiasm on the ground. Us coming would jumpstart things.” The tooling summit also helped get Scala Italy restarted as a conference. “There is enthusiasm out there that we need to ride and encourage even more.” The first action point is that we will have a community panel at Scala Days, led by Zainab Ali, who is very active in getting the London meetup going again. The panel will talk about attracting newcomers and retaining newcomers and improving diversity.

Darja also emphasized that the IT economy is not in good shape right now, and as a result, companies that used to answer “yes” often say “no” now. She’s hearing that from other conference organizers as well.

A board member observed that one challenge is that many companies don’t have office space anymore. Could we share information around that, maybe have a database for locations around the world, where free meeting space is available, which companies are interested in sponsoring, that kind of thing?

Another board member observed that Scala itself is in a new phase where it’s not as new and fresh anymore, compared to the early era Eugene recalled. Scala is more established, so it may be normal that it’s somewhat harder to attract people to meetups.

Darja: In Madrid we got in touch with Juan Manuel Serrano Hidalgo who is teaching Scala at a university there, and he secured a university building in central Madrid for the SIP meeting and tooling summit and Scala Spree. He also got in touch with local companies. Once you stumble upon someone like that who is very enthusiastic, activity can really spread like wildfire, in the most positive way.

Another board member suggested promoting the Scala Discord at the events in Madrid, so people know it’s somewhere active they can go. They also mentioned that non-English-language chat servers for Scala exist and some are quite active. These are linked from the Scala community page.

Proposals

SCP-031: Ensure reachability of Scala websites

The text of Lukas and Seth’s proposal is here:

SCP-031

During the technical report section, Julien summarized how Fabien Salvi at the Center resolved the issue. “We deployed a new infrastructure that uses a reverse proxy in front of the EPFL network, fixing the reachability issue.” This was also covered in a blog post published on July 12.

Since the work is already done, we didn’t vote formally. There were no objections from the board to considering the proposal both accepted and completed.

Conclusion

The company presentations will resume next quarter.

Some board members will be at Scala Days Madrid, but others won’t, and there are many other events on the schedule that week, so we won’t try to hold an in-person meeting. But there will be a dinner for board members, perhaps in combination with the SIP (Scala Improvement Process) committee.

April 27 2023

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 28th meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2023

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 and evolution, the Scala Improvement Process, Scala.js maintenance and tooling and tutorials, the Scala Toolkit, the Scala websites, the Scala Tooling Summit, TASTy-MiMa and TASTy-Query, Metals and BSP, Scaladex, the Scala 3 Compiler Academy and Compiler Sprees, Google Summer of Code, Scala Lunches at EPFL, Scala Days, and the Center’s five-year impact report.

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

report

Two new proposals were received this quarter:

SCP-029: Sbt community repository
SCP-030: Governance page

Both proposals were voted on and accepted by the board.

Other business discussed included SCP-027 (Refactoring), the Tooling Summit, and company overviews for Morgan Stanley and Spotify.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 15:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Apologies:

Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, Xebia Functional
Claire McGinty & Kellen Dye, Spotify
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. He presented from these slides, which concisely show what the Center is working on:

slides

His slides and remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q1 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q2 roadmap:

roadmap

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

SCP-027: Refactoring

Julien asked the board about SCP-027: Refactoring, which he suggested be marked “dormant”, based on what seems to be limited interest from either the board or the community. The proposal was originally submitted by Eugene when he was representing Twitter. In response, Eugene observed that there were multiple talks at Scala Matsuri about refactoring in large monorepos and reaffirmed the proposal’s importance, in his opinion (though he acknowledged that resources are always finite). Darja and Julien said let’s wait to see if there was any more external feedback, before changing the proposal’s status.

Management report

Darja presented this section. She especially highlighted the following items.

Since the last meeting, the Scala Center published the following annual roadmap for 2023:

roadmap blog post

Scala.js celebrated its 10th anniversary:

Scala.js anniversary blog post

The Scala Center hosted a Tooling Summit at EPFL, with about 40 participants:

Tooling Summit blog post

The Center published its Five Year Impact Report:

Five Year Impact Report

Staffing levels remained constant this quarter, except for interns. Quentin Bernet’s internship with the Center is now complete. Johanna Reichen and Lucas Nouguier have joined the Center for a limited time.

Darja shared some thoughts and plans around fundraising for the Center. Some discussion followed.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

The Scala 2.13.11 and 2.12.18 releases are nearly complete but will wait for 3.3.0 to happen first. Since the last meeting, we opened the following Discourse threads for discussion and updates on release timing:

Since the meeting, these threads were updated to include draft release notes. Themes in these releases including alignment with Scala 3, linting, JDK 20 and 21 support, Vector concatenation, reimplemented LinkedHashMap and LinkedHashSet, supported for Java 17’s sealed, and more.

Community report

Eugene said that recurring concerns in the community currently include Scala 3 adoption, the Akka relicensing, competing library ecosystems, and the question of what Scala’s main use cases or selling points are perceived to be, going forward.

Proposals

SCP-029: Sbt community repository

The text of Eugene’s proposal is here:

SCP-029: Sbt community repository

The proposal was prompted by the recent (April 7) repo.scala-sbt.org outage. It proposes making the Scala Center responsible for ensuring the continuance of sbt’s artifact hosting. The repository in question contains both old sbt plugins and current (and old) Linux installers.

As one board member observed, sbt isn’t formally a Scala Center project, and this proposal, which is limited in scope to binary hosting, wouldn’t change that. But the community doesn’t always make these distinctions around ownership; an sbt outage is damaging to Scala’s image regardless.

Julien said the Center is already investigating options. (Perhaps the existing hosting is adequate as long as we are better prepared to respond to outages?)

A suggestion was made to host the Linux installers on GitHub instead.

Voting: The proposal was accepted, by unanimous vote of members present.

SCP-030: Governance page for Scala

SCP-030: Governance page

Krzysztof presented his proposal. He emphasized that the proposal isn’t to create any new structures or responsibilities, but just to document what exists. He also said that incremental progress on documenting governance would be valuable; it doesn’t need to happen all at once.

Seth noted on the pull request that there is already a “Who’s behind Scala?” section on the Community page here, as a modest starting point.

Darja noted that any such page would need regular updating, and it would be important for the page not to promise more than the Center is actually able to provide.

Voting: The proposal was accepted, by unanimous vote of members present.

Company overviews

Daniela gave an overview of Scala usage at Morgan Stanley.

Claire gave an overview of Scala usage at Spotify.

Conclusion

As was usual through 2019, we hope to hold an in-person board meeting later this year in conjunction with Scala Days.

January 16 2023

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Minutes of the 27th meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2022

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 in-person events (conferences, summits, sprees, meetups, and workshops), online events, preparing the Center’s 5-year report, fundraising, Metals and its debugger, sbt plugin publishing, Scala 3 language improvements, the Scala 3 compiler, the Scala Improvement Process, the Scala Toolkit, Scala.js, TASTy-Query, TASTy-MiMa, the Scala websites, the EPFL Extension School partnership, Advent of Code, Scala 3 Compiler Academy, Scastie, Bloop, Coursier, and process automation for Center activities.

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

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included community representatives, coordination around tooling, the 2022 Scala Survey, and company overviews for Lunatech and VirtusLab.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Monday, January 16, 2023 at 12:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Michel Davit, Spotify (filling in for Claire McGinty)
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Affiliate members:

Piyush Rana, Knoldus

Piyush Rana introduced himself. He’s representing Knoldus, an affiliate member of the Center. Knoldus is a company of about 400 people, with about 100 Scala developers. Piyush based in Toronto, leading the company’s Scala division there. Knoldus was recently acquired by NashTech.

Management report

This section was presented by Darja.

Twitter and Databricks are leaving the Center’s advisory board.

Eugene Yokota, previously the Twitter representative, is now a community representative on the board.

Darja highlighted the Center’s continuing return to involvement with in-person events, under the improved COVID-19 situation. In Q4, Center staff participated in the Scala.IO conference in Paris and meetups in Warsaw and Lausanne. The Center is organizing a Scala Tooling Summit in Lausanne, to be held near the end of Q1 2023.

The Center also led or co-led online events such as ScalaCon and the Scala Advent of Code.

Darja and Adam Goodman gave a keynote, “Towards a Healthy and Resilient Scala Community”, at ScalaCon. It is available on video.

At the time of the meeting, the Center’s five-year report wasn’t quite ready, but a few weeks later it went online here.

Internal training in moderation is still in progress and it is still planned to offer a version of this training externally.

Staffing changes: Chris Kipp has joined the Center for a stint of at least three months, thanks to the sponsorship of Lunatech. Guillaume Martres has joined the Center as a staff engineer. He is already well known to the community for his years of work on the Scala 3 compiler as part of Martin’s lab (LAMP).

Financial report: The Center’s funding for the year of 2022 came 44.2% from 2022 memberships, 20.4% from 2021 memberships, 25.8% from MOOCs, 7.8% from EPFL, and 2.0% from donations. Expenses were 91.2% salaries, 6.3% governance, and 1.4% travel and events, and 1.1% extension school expenses. The Center has a small negative balance entering 2023, due to MOOC revenues which are delayed in arriving.

The Center’s key work areas for 2023 are:

Technical and educational infrastructure
Governance infrastructure
Involving stakeholders
Leveraging community contributors

Technical report

This section was presented by Julien. He presented highlights of the Center’s technical activities for the whole year of 2022, not just Q4, and also showed an annual roadmap for the whole year of 2023. Here are the slides:

2022/2023 slides

The slides are a condensed summary of the following blog post that Julien published a few weeks after the meeting:

2022/2023 blog post

For shorter-term review and shorter-term goals, please consult the Center’s quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s 2023 Q1 roadmap:

roadmap

These documents are not summarized here in the minutes.

A board member suggested consolidating documentation under fewer domains. Currently learning materials are spread across multiple domains: scala-lang.org, docs.scala-lang.org, the Metals site, the Scala-CLI site, etc. The splits reflect the different histories of different tools and the different groups that produce them, but such splits can be confusing to newcomers.

There was some discussion about ongoing support for both Scala 2 and Scala 3.

Proposals

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

At the time of the last board meeting, Scala 2.13.10 had just come out. This release has proved stable, so Lightbend doesn’t see a need to rush 2.13.11 or 2.12.18 releases. They are expected to follow in Q2, in accordance with the usual release cadence.

After the meeting, the following Discourse threads for discussion and updates on release timing were opened:

The Lightbend team continues to work on keeping Scala 2 and 3 aligned where possible, for example via the -Xsource:3 compiler option. The team also works on supporting migration from 2.12 to 2.13.

In December Lukas submitted SIP-51, “Drop Forwards Binary Compatibility of the Scala 2.13 Standard Library”, which proposes making it possible to make additions to the Scala 2 standard library by relaxing the forward compatibility restraint we’ve long had. An immediate motivation would be to allow tweaks like adding optimized implementations of certain collections methods, but larger changes could also be considered.

Other business

Community representatives

Chris gave an update on the process of finding community representatives for the board, after Rob and Bill stepped down. He said a committee gathered a list of candidates but many of them couldn’t accept, for various reasons. But Eugene accepted, and the community was notified by this blog post.

Eugene made remarks in favor of continued support and attention for Scala 2, and for ongoing attention to applying Scala to particular application areas and not just as a general-purpose language. He observes that people and companies often come to Scala out of interest in a particular frameworks or usage scenario, rather than interest in the language per se. He also mentioned that improved support for JDK 11 and 17 in tooling could use attention.

Tooling

As mentioned in Darja’s report, the Center is organizing an in-person Scala Tooling Summit in Lausanne, to be held near the end of Q1 2023.

Chris mentioned that the summit plan grew out of a series of online meetings that the Center has organized recently between Center and VirtusLab engineers, the JetBrains Scala plugin team, and other groups and individuals working on Scala tooling. He didn’t have concrete results to share yet but said that he expected the summit to result in materials that would be shared with the community.

2022 Scala survey

The results of the 2022 Scala developer survey were published in a December blog post.

Several board members found it concerning that not many developers with only a year or two of Scala experience responded to the survey. Does that reflect selection bias in survey respondents, or is it evidence that we aren’t doing enough to bringing new developers into the community? Someone pointed out that the survey data doesn’t clearly indicate how people came to Scala; what were they doing before?

But what concrete action could or should the Center take? Perhaps the publicity and resources the Center provides could put more emphasis on the specific use cases, frameworks, and stacks that actually exist in industry.

The Scala 3 usage numbers in the survey may seem surprisingly high, since we know that the largest companies using Scala have yet to migrate. Martin said he believes that the survey numbers reflect the popularity of Scala 3 at startups and smaller shops, and that it’s normal for adoption of newer technology at large enterprises to lag. “There’s another world out there,” he stated. There was some discussion around these issues.

Company overviews

Chris presented an overview of Scala usage at Lunatech and by its customers.

Krzysztof presented something similar for VirtusLab; his remarks were based on these slides.

Conclusion

As was usual through 2019, we hope to hold an in-person board meeting later this year in conjunction with Scala Days.

October 12 2022

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 26th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2022

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 Steward, Metals debugger, Scaladex, sbt, GitHub security alerts, SIP meetings, SIP-47 (Clause Interleaving), SIP-49 (Polymorphic Eta-Expansion), TASTy-Query, the Scala website, Scala.js ecosystem, Scala 3 Extension School, Scala 3 Compiler Academy, Google Summer of Code, the Scala Developer Survey, and additional work on open-source maintenance and educational materials.

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

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included officer elections, community representatives, Scala 2, Akka licensing, and communication strategy. We also heard about Scala usage at Goldman Sachs and about the results of 47 Degrees’ survey about Scala usage.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 5:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, Twitter

(Member companies may send multiple representatives to the meeting, but they share a single vote.)

Guests:

Rafa Paradela, 47 Degrees
James Townley, Lightbend

Apologies:

Haoyi Li, Databricks

Both community-representative seats are temporarily unfilled (see below).

Management report

Chris noted that, as discussed at previous meetings, the time slots for the director’s report and technical report have been shortened to allow more time for discussion.

The management, financial, and governance report was presented by Darja.

She noted that in-person Scala events have resumed and that the Center’s team has started to travel to meetups, conferences, and sprees.

She also highlighted that in September the Center conducted a full day of internal training on community moderation. They hope to offer similar training to community leaders in the future.

The following personnel changes have occurred at the Center:

Valérie Pedroni (Community and Communication Coordinator) is leaving.
Tomasz Godzik (Software Engineer) is leaving the Center, but will continue working on Scala tooling on staff at VirtusLab.

The Center is currently seeking to re-fill Valérie’s position.

Joining the Center are:

Guillaume Martres (Software Engineer) is already known to the community as Martin’s Ph.D student (he finished his degree recently) and a core member of the Scala 3 compiler team. He will do Scala 3 compiler work for the Center for at least the next three months.
Quentin Bernet (Software Engineer) is joining the Center for a six-month internship. He will work on the Scala 3 compiler and a new effort to produce a Scala 3 language specification.
Jędrzej Rochala (Software Engineer) is employed by VirtusLab and will join the Center under Virtus’s “contributing member” agreement with the Center. His current and future projects include Scastie and Coursier.

The financial report Darja showed a projected negative balance that is expected to return to positive once delayed MOOC funds are received. The Center aims to add at least one new member company soon.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

His remarks were based on the Center’s quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:

roadmap

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

Julien noted that the Q4 roadmap is focused on improving existing things in the Center’s stable projects, rather than starting entirely new efforts. They are prioritizing improvements that will be felt by typical Scala developers in their day-to-day activities.

A board member asked about security vulnerability scanning on GitHub. There was some feedback suggesting possible improvements; has that been acted upon? Julien wasn’t sure off the top of his head, but he’ll follow up after the meeting.

Proposals

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Elections

For chairperson, Chris Kipp put his name forward to continue as chair and was elected unanimously. (Chairs are not expected to serve for longer than one year, but a willing chair is also welcome to serve for longer.)

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

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

He said the main news was the release of Scala 2.13.9. He noted it had an unexpected binary compatibility issue that does not affect the standard library but could affect third-party libraries and as a result, 2.13.10 will follow shortly. (And in fact, it was released the day after the meeting.)

He noted that Scala 2.13.9 fixed a CVE in Java serialization of LazyList. He cautioned that even though this particular issue is now fixed, people should treat Java serialization in general as questionable from a security standpoint.

Other business

Community representatives

The Center received nominations from board members and condensed them to a short list of leading names. The Center has begun issuing invitations to the nominees, and it hopes to receive enough “yes” answers to fill at least one of the empty seats by the next meeting, if not both.

Akka license change

James Townley, product manager for Akka at Lightbend, joined the meeting as a guest to answer questions from board members about Akka’s recent switch from the open-source Apache license to the Business Source License.

One outcome of this segment of the meeting was the addition of an entry to Lightbend’s Akka license FAQ emphasizing that “Does this change affect Scala or sbt? No, it does not […]”.

The FAQ gives akka-license@lightbend.com as the contact address for any questions from the community.

Communication strategy for Scala

This was added to the agenda by Chris. He asked about the Center’s approach to publicizing things on LinkedIn versus Twitter and other outlets, including how it coordinates timing and alignment between the different groups involved with Scala.

Several other board members expressed interest in seeing the Center using multiple sites and mediums to get news out. Darja and Julien acknowledged the feedback and said (specifically) that it was not the intent to publish anything exclusively on LinkedIn, going forward, and also (more generally) they’d take the feedback received from the board to heart.

Company overviews

Graham Griffiths presented about Scala usage at Goldman Sachs, especially within his own team, which works on a DSL for financial contracts.

Rafa Paradela, director of engineering at 47 Degrees, joined the meeting as a guest to present the data the company gathered about Scala usage, both internally and in the community, and share some conclusions.

Conclusion

Chris asked whether we might be able to have one advisory board meeting in person in 2023. Darja said yes, we’ll do that at Scala Days if at all possible. (But there aren’t any firm dates yet.)

So we expect the next meeting will be held virtually in January.

June 28 2022

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 25th meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2022

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 extending Martin’s (and the Center’s) time at EPFL, launching the partnership (and new revenue stream) with EPFL’s Extension School, Power Coders, overseeing student projects, in-person meetups, new moderators committee, new SIP committee, the debugging experience, Dependabot-based security alerts for Scala projects on GitHub, Scala website, and the Scala 3 Compiler Academy.

Details are below and in the directors’ activity report:

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included revisions on the refactoring proposal (SCP-027), and community representative nominations.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 5:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Michel Davit, Spotify
Kellen Dye, Spotify
Eugene Yokota, Twitter
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab

(Board members may send multiple representatives to the meeting, but they share a single vote.)

Apologies:

Kris Mok, Databricks
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL

Martin was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict.

Both community-representative seats are temporarily unfilled. (No votes were taken at this meeting.)

Director’s report

This management, financial, and governance report was presented by Darja.

Staff changes: as already announced last meeting, Meriam Lachkar (engineer) has left the Center. Anatolii Kmetiuk (engineer) has joined (coming over from LAMP). Valérie Pedroni (communications) has been promoted from intern to Community and Communication Coordinator (at 60% effort).

Current staffing levels: 6 engineers, 1 system administrator, 1 community/communication, 2 administration/management.

The Center is also overseeing student work: currently, four Google Summer of Code projects and six semester projects at EPFL.

Financial report: the situation is “on track”, there is “no major change” since last time. The Center is not currently hiring.

Darja announced that Martin is staying at EPFL another 6 years. (The required approval from the university was obtained.) This means the Center can also stay at EPFL for that long.

Martin was also recently awarded an Advanced Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to support research, including funding for graduate students. He has tweeted some information about the grant. Note also that the grant includes support for Scala Native.

At the last meeting it was mentioned that the Center was working with EPFL’s Extension School to add paid individualized support from Center engineers to the Center’s “Effective Programming in Scala” MOOC. This has now launched; see blog post. This is a new revenue stream for the Center.

As also mentioned last meeting, the Center is working with Power Coders, a non-profit, to offer technical training and job-search assistance to refugees (from Ukraine and elsewhere).

With the pandemic situation eased somewhat, the Center has resumed participation in in-person events. So far, Center engineers have joined meetup events in Lausanne and Zürich and events in Paris, Milano, and more are coming.

The new Compiler Academy project, led by Anatolii, has begun publishing videos about Scala 3 compiler internals on their YouTube channel. The Scala 3 compiler “issue sprees” are continuing, also.

On the governance front:

Adam Goodman’s time consulting for the Center has ended for now (as of May 30), but the Center intends to re-engage with him in the future, after the Center has “put in motion more of the things we have learned”.

So far, two committees have formed: the moderators committee and the new SIP (Scala Improvement Process) committee. More committees and projects will launch in Q3 and Q4.

The moderators committee has met once so far to discuss plans. An internal training for moderators is planned for September.

Darja shared information about the new SIP committee and revised process, including the list of initial committee members. The same ground that she covered has since been made public in a blog post on the Scala website.

A board member asked if the Center will introduce a concept of formal “membership” in the Scala community. Darja said perhaps, but it won’t be considered until later.

Another board member asked about diversity (gender and otherwise) on the SIP committee. Darja noted that the new committee has more diverse backgrounds and concerns than in the past, but the initial membership obviously isn’t diverse in other respects. She emphasized that this was despite the Center’s conscious efforts. (For example, some candidates were considered but weren’t available, in some cases because they are already busy with other boards and committees.) The committee membership will rotate more frequently than in the past, and the Center’s efforts to increase diversity on the committee will continue.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

His remarks were based on the Center’s quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q3 roadmap:

roadmap

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

The roadmap is detailed, but centers on these four big goals:

Polish the developer experience
Improve the newcomers’ experience
Grow the community
Ensure up-to-date and resilient infrastructure

A blog post is forthcoming about the in-progress collaboration with the Dependabot team at GitHub to support security alerts for sbt projects.

A board member asked about overlap between the Dependabot project and Scala Steward, which sends dependency update pull requests to Scala OSS repos. Julien said “there is some overlap” for now. Another board member asked whether the Dependabot work is sbt-specific or whether it’s based on a library that other build tools could use. Julien said it is sbt-specific for now.

A board member asked about the Center’s plans for bringing more of the library ecosystem (including web frameworks), user base, and job market over to Scala 3. Julien said there are multiple factors in play here, but migration of macros is one factor still causing slowdowns. He said the Center’s own focus remains on improving tooling and documentation.

The board member also asked whether the refugees the Center is working with through Power Coders are being trained on 2 or 3, and whether the website work is too focused on 3. Julien said “I really believe that when you learn Scala 3 you are not going to be lost if you have to use Scala 2” on the job.

Krzysztof mentioned that VirtusLab has some availability to help some core libraries, for example akka-http and sangria, migrate their macros, and he invited board members to let them know if they think specific core libraries are blocking ecosystem migrations and could use assistance.

A board member asked about forward compatibility for Scala 3 versions. For example, should libraries continue supporting Scala 3.0, or move on to 3.1? Julien said that new recommendations in this area are forthcoming, including introducing a concept of LTS (“long term support”) Scala versions.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Seth.

Scala 2.12.16 came out and seems to have been well received. The change list is modest and focuses on compatibility with recent JDK versions (15 through 19).

2.12.16 does include one regression that was discovered after the artifacts were published. Only mixed compilation of Scala and Java source files together is affected, and only when the Scala code contains references to certain inner classes in the Java sources. The problem manifests as a compile-time type error. The release notes links to details and workaround information. The Lightbend team has already fixed the problem, for release with Scala 2.12.17 in 2 to 3 months.

The team had initially planned to release 2.13.9 at around the same time but decided to wait until Scala 3.2 comes out, so 2.13.9 can include TASTy reader changes to support 3.2, which could be released as soon as late July.

The following forum threads can be used to discuss release contents and timing:

Proposals

SCP-027: Refactoring

This proposal from Twitter was originally submitted last November and has been through several rounds of discussion and revision since then.

As suggested last meeting, a working group was created was to refine the proposal, consisting of Eugene, Krzysztof, Seb, Julien, Adrien Piquerez, and Tomasz Godzik. The group met in May and based on the discussion, Julien submitted a pull request with revisions and prepared a summary of the changes.

In that summary, Julien writes: “In essence, the solution that emerged from the discussion is to rely on Scalafix to implement the refactorings at the project level, and to implement a tool to ‘drive’ Scalafix to apply the refactorings in all the desired projects.”

The estimate of effort required is 1-2 developer months. It’s expected that most of the work will be done by the Metals team.

Other business

Community representatives

Chris urged the board to submit nominations, so that the seats can be filled before the next meeting. He noted that nominations needn’t be cleared with the nominees in advance; making sure they’re willing can come later.

One board member noted the absence of in-person events during the pandemic has made it difficult for us to get to know community people well enough. (Regardless, we need to proceed with the knowledge we have.)

Board members also noted that the community reps needn’t have such a long and visible history with Scala as past reps have had; the pool of such people is too small and not very diverse.

Conclusion

We aim to hold the next meeting in September. It should include the annual election of officers.

Scala Center at EPFL

February 5 2025

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

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

Scala 2 report

SCP-034: Artifact publishing

Elections

Community report

Management and financial report

Conclusion

September 5 2024

Minutes of the 33rd meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2024

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Introduction

Technical report

Scala 2 report

Community report

SCP-032: Provide guidance on choosing between Scala LTS and Next

SCP-033: Deprecate Eclipse Scala IDE

Management report

Conclusion

April 25 2024

Minutes of the 32nd meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2024

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Introduction

Technical report

Management and financial report

Scala 2 report

Community report

Conclusion

February 7 2024

Minutes of the 31st meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2023

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

Scala 2 report

Community report

Management and financial report

Conclusion

October 17 2023

Minutes of the 30th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2023

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

Management report

Scala 2 report

Community report

Elections

Conclusion

July 26 2023

Minutes of the 29th meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2023

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

Management report

Scala 2 report

Community report

Proposals

SCP-031: Ensure reachability of Scala websites

Other topics

Governance page (SCP-030)

Conclusion

April 27 2023

Minutes of the 28th meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2023

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

SCP-027: Refactoring

Management report