Scala Meeting report, 2010-07-27

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.

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Scala Meeting 2010-07-27

People attending the meeting: Miguel, Toni, Hubert, Martin, Phil, Gilles,
Donna, Alex, Iulian, Philipp.

* Current work

- Added parallel scan to parallel collection library
- Vector concatenation

* Scalacheck
- We will add Scalacheck to the build process (it is needed for testing
parallel collections)

* Testing
- Now that 2.8.0 is out, Paul’s refactorings to partests can be applied
again (if he is still interested in working on it); we will contact him
- We received a message offering us some help with improving the testing
infrastructure, further suggesting a possible rewrite of the whole
infrastructure. After some debate, we concluded that a complete rewrite of
the testing suite is probably not practical at this time. However, it would
be very helpful to have updates or complements to partest in order to
support unit testing (for example based on ScalaTest).

* SBT build
- We are looking into moving the Scala compiler building infrastructure
to SBT. Scalacheck and partest should be included directly in the SBT build.

* Tutorials
- Following a request, do we allow our tutorials (and other reports) to
be published by third parties. For this request, we will grant a single,
non-transferable license to reprint the Scala tutorial. Meanwhile,
interested people in the lab will consider what license to use for our
tutorials and other documentation (probably some variation of Creative
Commons).

* Collections
- Missing: LinkedMultiMap, MultiMap, MultiSet/Bag (efficient inclusion
mechanism) (Food for thought, waiting for a contributor) (Consider using
HashTries for the immutable implementations)
- May be slightly improved: PriorityQueue (we will look into it shortly)

* Scaladoc study
- The survey is online, we are gathering very interesting feedback