Scala 2.8 has been released 4 weeks ago. Following our poll on the main page of the site, over 500 projects (more than 50%) have been converted to 2.8 already or the migration will be completed very soon. Now that this major version update is done, I wanted to give a quick sketch of what's to follow.
First, we plan to have a bugfix release 2.8.1. We expect this to come out September/October 2010. There have been no really bad issues raised against 2.8, which is a welcome relief, given the huge number of changes that went into it. Nevertheless, it's good to get smaller tickets out of the way before new things are added.
The next additions to the libraries are planned for version 2.9, which we hope to have out by December/January. One major addition for this version will be parallel collections. Parallel collections will reap the benefits of the new uniform collections framework in 2.8. They will integrate seamlessly into that framework, supporting the same operations as Scala's sequential collections, but making use of multicores to speed things up. The first version of parallel collections is already in the nightly builds, so you can experiment with them today.
Beyond parallel collections and Scala 2.9, we expect lots of interesting developments for making use of massively parallel hardware in novel ways. Some "teaser papers" will appear in this year's Onward! conference and in GPCE.
There are also many other interesting libraries and tools in development. Watch this space for more detailed info soon.