Scala Meeting 2011/09/06

We are currently publishing a summary of each of the weekly meetings of the Scala Core Team.

This information is made available as a service to the community. It is by necessity rather brief and gives only a rough approximation of the main points of discussions explored during each meeting; it should not be taken as a source of reliable information, nor as a record of concrete or firm decisions, nor as anything other than a record of a simple discussion.

The summary that follows is primarily intended for Scala contributors and maintainers. If you are not a contributor to the Scala system, the information below is unlikely to be very useful to you, and you might lack some of the necessary background to make sense of all the discussion items.

We do not have enough people on the team to be able to write a more complete record, and we might also not have the resources to discuss every point in detail afterwards. Nevertheless, we hope that this record, cursory as it is, is better than nothing.

Status

Vlad: candidacy exam

Toni: migration of Scala IDE infrastructure and Scala Days video encoding (should be ready soon)

Mirco:  vacation, consulting work

Vojin: candidacy exam

Neda: reading papers

Iulian: fighting bundle versioning issues in Eclipse (uninstalling a trunk version and re-installing a 2.9 version of the plugin leads to disaster). This is the main reason we delayed a new beta.

Martin: in Finland at a developer’s day. Reflection compiler, trying to get it to work on fancy examples - structural types for example

Adriaan: re-implemented most of pattern matching run-time semantics in 500 LOC that translates matching similarly to how we desugar for-comprehensions, now battling with last 10% and discrepancies between the spec and the current pattern matcher implementation 

Lukas: re-working effects to support ordering (e1 then e2). Tried to compile Scala IDE with a modified compiler.

Eugene: nothing to report

Trond, Frederik: working on an Akka course

Miguel: CLR Generics

Phil: Typesafe stuff

Luc: IDE, auto-complete on any class (even if they’re not visible without explicit prefix)

Josh: sbt - getting memory usage down, recompile community libraries against the scala build, you can have unit tests for the library (much faster than partest)

Grzegorz: first version of Scala+GWT, one of community members debates on tighter linking of Scala and GWT -- he has proposal + a branch implementing it

Hubert: error trees, going to push it into trunk

Paul: classpaths: “it’s a crazy world out there”

Discussion

2.8.2

Community asked for backport of SI-3687. The fix closed other tickets at the same time; must split. Then push out a new RC in a few days. Hubert will take care of the bugfix.

Classpaths

Paul: class paths and class loaders are way too complicated. We have 8 options that modify the classpath. It’s the interaction between classloaders and classpaths that’s challenging. Especially in a managed environment, like GAE or SBT.

Better classpath/classloader would benefit the REPL, could use this to provide simply-scala for any Scala version, don’t want to duplicate SBT. Also, related to passing in a custom Global (can’t currently do this in SBT)

Will document in more detail first.

Talk on CLR Generics, anyone? [Miguel]

Ongoing work on CLR Generics: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~magarcia/ScalaNET/slides/2011-09-06-GenericsGettingCloser.pdf 

Bugs

Thinking about making objects non-final, so they can override. What about super?