The Scala Center activities in the last 6 months (March-August 2019)

Scala Center Updates
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For the full/in-depth reports, we recommend reading:

For a lighter version, keep on scrolling (o:

Scala Days 2019

More than 1000 Scala enthusiasts gathered to discuss and share the Scala knowledge, learn from each other and network.

Short summary:

The Scala Center, EPFL, and Lightbend organized and hosted the following events (10-14 June 2019, Lausanne, Switzerland):

  • Scala Contributors Summit (more info coming soon), next at Sphere.it 08.10.2019, Krakow, Poland

  • Scala spree (around 60 attendees, 10 projects, photo)

  • ScalaBridge (around 15 attendees, photo)

  • Scala Days (around 1000 attendees, 24 sponsors, 56 talks, 3 social events, photo)

  • Typelevel Summit (around 80 attendees, 10 talks, photos)

Check out the videos here:

VirtusLab joined the Scala Center as contributors member

We are delighted to welcome VirtusLab as a Contributor Member of the Scala Center. As an integral part of this membership, VirtusLab contributes engineering time and efforts to projects of the Scala Center. You may already have heard that they have been significantly contributing to Metals in the past few months.

Team changes

We at the Scala Center said goodbye to Ólafur Pall Geirsson who, after a long and fantastic run at the Scala Center, moved to the next chapter in his career, and joined the Twitter engineering team as of August 2019.

In the last 3 years, Ólaf spearheaded the development of several well-known tools, including

The landscape of tooling for Scala would not be anywhere near what it is now without him! We wish him our very best <3

We also had an opportunity to say welcome to Jamie Thompson, the new addition to our team, who will be mainly focusing on updating the Scala 2 compiler to read TASTy signatures emitted by Scala 3, which will allow for bidirectional dependencies between the two compilers.

What’s to be expected next

  • On the engineering side, the main change to our current activities is the work on supporting TASTy signatures in Scala 2, which will be undertaken by Jamie. This will be a major stepping stone to easy the migration of the ecosystem from Scala 2 to Scala 3. Our other current projects, among which bloop and Metals, are still on track.

  • On the education side, we are currently in the process of updating all the courses to a more recent Scala and sbt versions (Scala 2.13 and sbt 1). We are also redesigning the Functional Programming Principles and Functional Program Design courses to make the curriculum simpler. We will test the new version (based on Dotty) this semester with EPFL students and we will update the online public courses with the release of Scala 3.

  • On the community/communication side, you can expect more frequent communication about our work, SIP meetings restarting (yes, and the minutes published more diligently, thank you for your patience with me), supporting the Scala spree and ScalaBridge organizing around the world, being involved in Scala Days program management and more!

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