A small clarification: this an older project that is not directly related to my upcoming ScalaDays talk [1]. More updates to come in next few months, stay tuned.<p>[1] <a href="http://event.scaladays.org/scaladays-nyc-2016#!#schedulePopupExtras-7571" rel="nofollow">http://event.scaladays.org/scaladays-nyc-2016#!#schedulePopu...</a>
This project has been discontinued. But fear not, a new scala-native is on the way, Denys Shabalin a phd student at EPFL is working on completely new implementation of scala-native. His previous work, scala offheap, a way to use off-heap memory on the JVM with type- and memory-safety is very impressive.
This may sound ridiculous, but I am literally sick of Java/JVM land. I would beg for native Scala backend (and it would be my first choice for doing pretty much every thing).I don't know people does share this opinion or not ,but I literally hate JVM.Slow Start up.Tremendously slow/unresponsive java app(I am talking about big apps, like android studio). Ridiculously bad font handling in Swing(there is no way to disable hinting).<p>Syntactically and semantically Scala is one of the best language's I have ever worked with (although I spend little time with it).It's middle approach to OOP and FP is best approach for enterprise projects.It does not try to shove FP in your throat, but provide best platform to do FP when it is much more efficient than simple OOP.
However when it comes to JVM (especially in Linux desktop). My answer is big fat NO.<p>Of course, I am talking about desktop experience.JVM in server side is great and robust, I don't have anything against it, other than praise.
The other announcement[1] from EPFL last week was the establishment of Scala Center,
which is already staffed: <a href="http://search.epfl.ch/ubrowse.action?acro=SCALA-GE" rel="nofollow">http://search.epfl.ch/ubrowse.action?acro=SCALA-GE</a><p>The Center's mission: "Organize open source projects around Scala".<p>About scala-native, no details are given on whether it targets scalac or Dotty
(which another talk [2] describes as a couple years away from production-ready).
The situation could change if, say, Akka or Play announced a Roadmap for Dotty.<p>[1] Martin Odersky: "Scala in 2016". <a href="http://files.meetup.com/18712511/Scala2016.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://files.meetup.com/18712511/Scala2016.pdf</a><p>[2] ScalaSphere: Guillaume Martres "Hacking on Dotty: a live demo". <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OOYGeZLHs4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OOYGeZLHs4</a>
Apart from startup times, would this really be faster than the JVM? I don't know how the LLVM runtime stacks up - I'm guessing that there are a few targets eg traits that might be more efficient to implement in native code as Scala would be trying to work around what exists in the JVM and Java Bytecode but I have a feeling that it would be very specific use cases like embedded systems that would be considering LLVM as a target where as the JVM would still be preferred in most circumstances? I'm asking from a fairly naive place - I'm genuinely interested and curious to hear some use cases where LLVM would be almost strictly better.
The Github and mailing list shows no activity for >3 years. Either the idea did not work out or all they had was just idea and nobody came forward to pickup and develop working software.<p>In any case Scala seems to have large following among those who love JVM and Java ecosystem libraries.
This is a cool direction. Other than previous Scala knowledge, what are some advantages of using some sort of scala-native over Rust? I've used Scala and I always imagined that I'd use Rust if I wanted something similar without the ecosystem of JVM libraries.
While interesting in and of it self, it seems to have seen no changes since mid-2013, looking at its GitHub repository (<a href="https://github.com/greedy/scala" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/greedy/scala</a>)<p><pre><code> > This branch is 211 commits ahead, 10086 commits behind scala:2.12.x.
</code></pre>
Is there any new context / development that makes this extra interesting right now?
I've clearly been paying too much attention to politics. My first scan of headlines here left me asking, in which case before the Supreme Court was LLVM an issue?<p>Although I must admit I would love to read the late Scalia's opinion of LLVM.