Interesting rant about Scala's issues

[Rikki Cattermole]

On Thursday, 3 April 2014 at 08:18:01 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
> My knowledge of compiler constructions is fairly limited and I 
> might be wrong, but it seems to me that the Scala compiler is 
> broken. Scala has gained some bad reputation for long build 
> times (just google for Scala and build time) which IMHO cannot 
> be explained by the large number of language features. D has a 
> comparable large number of language features and compiles much 
> faster than Scala.
>
> D has been designed from the beginning with caution on 
> compilation speed and thinking about how to keep it slow to 
> begin with. D not only in that way is a language that was 
> thought out. On the contrary, Scala seems to me to be a 
> language where many features of various languages were thrown 
> into one and then a compiler was built for it. The incremental 
> Scala compiler pretty much rescues the build time problem, 
> though, and they are mostly lucky now. Also, IMHO, implicits 
> are really crazy and it should have been clear from the 
> beginning that they will become a problem for scalable build 
> times, see 
> http://java.dzone.com/articles/implicits-scala-conversion. 
> Interestingly. Martin Odersky got his Ph.D. from Niklaus Wirth 
> at the ETH and I don't want to know what Wirth would say about 
> implicits.
>
> The presentation by Paul Phillips was discussed in the Scala 
> forums at great length:
>
> What's up with Paul Phillips?
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/scala-debate/IgrKCdConlA
> 54 replies
>
> What's up with Paul Phillips?
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/scala-user/ImqlClXTrS4[201-225-false]
> 201 replies
>
> Sadly, the only serious language on the JVM besides Java8 is 
> Scala. Ceylon has not taken off at all after becoming 1.0. 
> Groovy's language extensions are basically AST transformations 
> and not truly baked into a "real" language. Nobody knows how 
> Kotlin will be doing when it turns 1.0 maybe somewhen in 
> autumn/winter this year.
>
> To get a plus for your skill set when applying for Java jobs 
> you will have to learn Scala. For a Java developer like me any 
> chances for a job doing D are very slim. But I keep looking 
> into D just out of interest and to get some food for my mind. 
> There is so much to learn from looking at D and playing with it 
> that I keep doing it just on a fun & interest basis.

If I remember what the state of Groovy is (around 2012). The 
compiler devs focussed quite heavily on functionality not 
performance. Even refused to go that direction.
It was quite bad.

Its a real shame. I liked it. Although if they had and had 
unsigned types I probably wouldn't be in D!