Scala Meeting report, 2010-09-28

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, 28 September 2010

People attending: Alex, Donna, Philipp, Miguel, Iulian, Gilles, Martin, Hubert, Toni, Lukas, Phil, Adriaan, Tiark

* Current work:
parallel views, scheduling, Scala.NET/IKVM, Eclipse, presentation compiler, TreeCheckers, general bug fixing

* 2.8.1 RC1
Regressions: #3859, #3865, #3875, #3864 (already fixed) 
will aim for an RC2 on Thursday or Friday

* Annotations
In the library: some annotation classes are in the root package, some in other packages (scala.annotation). not very systematic.

two purposes:
- annotation infrastructure (ClassfileAnnotation, StaticAnnotation, TypeConstraint), 
- annotations with significance to the compiler/runtime (@volatile, @serializable, ...)

Need more discussion. Will raise the topic on scala-internals.

* For 2.9 or later:

an idea to make Application object work well, by means of a 'magic' marker trait DelayedInit.

trait DelayedInit[T] { 
def delayedInit(body: => T)
}
class Application extends DelayedInit[Unit] {
val codeBuffer ...
def delayedInit(body) = codeBuffer += () => body
def main(args) { codeBuffer.foreach(_.apply()) }
}

compiler translates
class Test extends Application { ... }
to
class Test extends Application { delayedInit { ... } }

Need to do a prototype implementation and see how it works.

* Nightlies vs. checkins

ScalaDoc tests are now run for every checkin (they weren't before). 

* Copyright/Licence

(has been discussed before) Scala licence slightly different from MIT/BSD licence -- should use standard MIT/BSD licence? Need to contact the original author of the Scala licence for input.