Yeah, it’s disheartening to see how many things are not followed through after the initial burst of effort.
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Yeah, but it’s understandable. Very few people are getting paid actual money to work on the compiler. Many others who do work on the compiler are getting paid with “interesting stuff to do”. If you they do too much of the annoying bug fixing, they won’t be doing anything at all.
Back in 2007/08/09 when I first started using Scala, there was a similar situation as that described above. The Scala 2 codebase was largely maintained by EPFL staff and students, and priorities were often heavily influenced by particular researchers’ projects. Many promising features were built and added to Scala, but then decayed once the students moved on. Many bugs went unfixed.
At the time, there was a view from early industrial adopters that this mode was unsustainable.
Organisations like Typesafe (which became Lightbend) and Scala Center were established in part to support the industrial uptake of Scala. To do work that was “important”, rather than “interesting”
It does make me anxious when I hear that there’s insufficient sponsorship or interest in Scala 3 to work on fixing known bugs.
That said, it does have to be acknowledged that in every Scala releases’ notes, I see long lists of bugs that have been fixed.
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