Redesigned collections v0.2.0

We are happy to announce the 0.2.0 release of the collection strawman!

The collection strawman aims to be a replacement of the existing collections for the Scala 2.13 standard library. Essentially, the goal is to make the API simpler, the implementation more maintainable and to have better lazy collections. You can read more about this effort in this blog post.

Current status

The goal of this milestone is to be feature compatible with the current collections for the most common use cases.

The following collection types are implemented:

• List and ListBuffer,
• Vector and ArrayBuffer,
• Range and NumericRange,
• LazyList (equivalent to the existing Stream),
• mutable and immutable HashSet and BitSet,
• mutable and immutable HashMap,
• mutable and immutable TreeSet and TreeMap.

Also, most of the operations of the current Traversable, Iterable, Seq and Set collection types are implemented in the strawman.

For reference, a detailed list of the current implementation status is available here.

To experiment with this milestone, just add the following dependency:

"ch.epfl.scala" %% "collection-strawman" % "0.2.0"

The collection strawman is compatible with Scala 2.13 and Dotty (Scala 2.12 is also supported though you might encounter type inference issues with it).

Since these collections have to coexist with the actual standard collections, they live in a separate package, strawman.collection (instead of scala.collection):

import strawman.collection.immutable.List

println(List(1, 2, 3).map(x => x + 1))

In order to make this release a real “drop-in” replacement of the current collections, we are working on a rewrite tool (available soon) that takes care of changing the imports of an existing project to use the strawman namespace. This tool should automate most of the adaptation work by unimporting the existing collections and importing the strawman instead, by renaming collection types that have changed (e.g. Stream into LazyList), and by adapting some constructs that are not yet supported in the strawman (e.g. 0 until 10 has to be written Range(0, 10)).

Next steps

We encourage you to give a try to the new collections and to report any issue you encounter. We expect common usage to still work with the strawman with no or little modifications on your code.

Because the internal implementation is different from the existing collections, you might get some surprises in advanced use cases: for instance, now the view method returns a View[A] type ; there is no CanBuildFrom. We will explain these undocumented (yet) changes in future posts.

From now on, we will cut new releases every month. The goals of the next release are to implement a little bit more operations, to polish some internal implementation details, and to integrate a stronger test suite.