After the first Scala Native release under the Scala Center’s care, it’s time to check the progress of our goals and step in the new cycle of planning.
Short and mid-term goals
Our major goal in this category was supporting Scala 2.12 and 2.13. It was fully accomplished with complete support for their latest releases - 2.12.13 and 2.13.4.
The effort investment in building solid foundations for reflection support enabled us to provide a more robust testing interface. For both of them Scala Native and Scala.js now share a standardized API. We believe it will help developers to cross-publish for both platforms.
Scala Native is now providing native runtime for the JUnit testing framework. It can be used by users to integrate with their existing JVM test-bases as well as to cross-test between the 3 execution platforms: JVM, Scala Native, and Scala.js. This also improved our quality assurance - we can now reuse the rich test-base defined in Scala.js, and in the future, we will be able to run tests against the JVM implementations to provide the highest possible compliance in our Java standard library implementation.
Long-term goals
The Scala Center committed to improve and enhance Native interoperability and some steps have been taken in fulfilling this goal. We have improved interop for C function pointers - they can now be created via implicit conversion from ordinary scala.Function, as well as created from / cast to arbitrary pointer type. Also, the type-safety of some native methods was improved. We are currently working on other interop features that might be introduced in future releases, e.g.: easier definition of fixed-size arrays and structural types, or linking Scala code as native libraries.
With recent support for Scala 2.12 and 2.13, we’re keeping up with support for the latest Scala 2 releases. We also realize the need for the future support of Scala 3 andwe are going to provide it as soon as other more urgent issues will be addressed and polished. Among these we can mention support for multithreading, compliance with various processor architectures, providing an implementation of missing methods in the Java standard library.
Other activity
Besides, the main goals the Scala Center has provided multiple bug fixes addressing various aspects of Scala Native, their list can be found in the latest changelog. We have also improved the Scala Native configuration interface in the sbt plugin to be more compact, easier to use and maintain.
Finally it is important to acknowledge and celebrate contributions from our community including multiple bug fixes, as well as new features like cross-compilation, support for Java default methods in Scala 2.11, providing bindings for native libraries or pending work on support for 32-bit architecture.
Check out our release 0.4.0 blog post describing the most user-impacting changes introduced and stay tuned for the next updates.
– The Scala Center Team