Scala Meeting report, 2010-03-23

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
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decisions, nor as anything other than a record of a simple discussion.

The summary that follows is primarily intended for Scala contributors and
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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.

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Scala Meeting 2010-03-23

Starts at 14h00 Scala Time (GMT+1).

People attending the meeting: Donna, Ingo, Gilles, Martin, Alex, Toni,
Hubert, Philipp, Lukas.

* Current work
- integrating concat into vectors
- parallel ranges + benchmarks
- new pickle format
- bugfixing

* 2.8 Roundup
RC this or next week? Except for regressions, no bug fixes will go into the
2.8.0 branch once we have an RC.
- parallel collections will go in after 2.8
- some swing bugs could be fixed (after friday)
- pickle format: if everything goes well it should be ready by the end
of the week
- @specialize annotations in the std lib, run the standard build with
-Yspecialize
- Functions, tuples, maybe a little more
- It would mean RC next week
- The specializer will be on by default. Compiler flag "-Ynospecialize".
- It might take 2 or 3 days to build the release
- Bugfixes: everybody should look their list
- ticket cyclic reference in classfile parser
- New classpaths are checked in. Will need a week or so to mature. It
potentially affects many tools.
- Eclipse: it's probably fine

=> probably release end of next week.

- Lift: David said he needs roughly 6 weeks after the first RC.

* Naming Schemes
- Argument on the mailing list: "If we add features it should be 2.9"
(David Pollack on Parallel Collections)
- What about 2.10? Will tools continue to work?
- Current policy:
- Library extension into x.x.X release
- Language changes into x.X release
- Binary compatibility x.X
- Source incompatibility should be X, but we made an exception for 2.8.

We think that the current policy is fine.