Hey there, I’m one of the main maintainers of Zinc and one of the creators of bloop. The rationale behind bloop is just that: create a build server easy to integrate with and that enables any build tool to provide the best Scala developer experience out of the box. The bloop website linked above is rich in details.
We decided to do this after realizing how badly integrated Zinc was in many popular build tools and how it lacked many performance improvements that could be fixed and be provided as a service for every build tool, improving the experience for every Scala developer no matter what build tool they use. For example, Bloop has pioneered an implementation of pipelined compilation that intends to compile your build faster.
So far, bloop is only missing one feature (safe and performant handling of concurrent compilations for the same project; which I have already partly implemented) before I start to gradually improve our build plugins in Maven, gradle and sbt to integrate with bloop via BSP.
The main requirement of these improved integrations is that end users will now know that they are using bloop under the hood – they will only benefit from all the improvements bloop offers (reduced memory consumption, faster compiles, etc) without learning another tool or paying a UX cost.
I believe it’s a matter of days before we can see these build tools using bloop together with IDEs. For the moment, Metals, fury and IntelliJ are already integrating with bloop. I’ll keep you updated @eyalroth if you’re interested in more developments.
A good way to stay up-to-date is to watch the repo or use our scalacenter/bloop gitter channel.