Scala 2.9 vs 2.10 Performance

This isn't the most compelling of benchmarks. It's still infinitely better than what most people do--the author actually measured something in a reasonable way!--but I don't think it's enough to make any interesting conclusions. I suppose it shows that there <i>is</i> a performance boost, which is great, but I'd really like to know where the gains really are.<p>Could somebody familiar with the changes to 2.10 explain where the performance boost came from and what code it will affect? Does this make Scala a more compelling choice for the discerning functional programmer?

Performance improvements are nice and all, but I'm already generally satisfied with the performance of Scala 2.8.x and 2.9.x.<p>What I'd really like to see is faster compile times. I know it's a tall order given the complexity of implicits, but compared to other languages Scala compilation slowness can be a tough sell.

Nice post, I just used your benchmark to also compare running Scala in JDK 6 and 7 <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4862035" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4862035</a>