

Scala 2.8.0 RC1 released - stephenjudkins
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/5982

======
stephenjudkins
There's a ton of great and long-awaited stuff in this release, but I'm
especially excited about the delimited continuations (<http://www.scala-
lang.org/node/2096>) support.

If you've struggled with asynchronous I/O in the past, libraries implemented
using delimited continuations might seem like a breath of fresh air. They make
it possible to write functionally asynchronous code in a traditional blocking
style. Further, continuations can be serialized, introspected, and passed
around from machine to machine.

~~~
flatline
Is the continuations library confirmed to be in there? (I guess I could just
download it and see...) I have the beta and that package was not present.

~~~
sreque
As the linked page states, this is the first distribution where the
continuation plugin is part of the main release.

------
sreque
I really hope Scala 2.8 lives up to its potential. Having used Scala 2.7 for
close to a year now during my personal time, I'm very impressed with the
vision and direction of the language. However, the language and its
surrounding tools are immmature and I almost feel like any productivity I gain
through using Scala is more than offset by the battles I wage with its tools.

Every time I code up a new project, for instance, I swear I encounter a new
compiler or library bug. I've had jcl libraries spin in infinite loops, I've
had the persistent immutable Set consistently crash during a filter, I've had
the compiler both die at compile time and generate bad code that failed at
runtime when trying to shield me from the ugly details of jvm arrays, and I've
had actor libraries deadlock, forcing me to switch to using java executors.
Buildr's Scala support is very immature and buggy. The Eclipse plugin is also
unstable and I've at least twice had to rebuild my workspace from scratch. It
also degrades heavily in performance over time so that I am frequently
restarting Eclipse.

I think that the above problems are partially because the language is new, but
partially because Scala as a project is so ambitious. They are trying to cover
up all the warts of the JVM and create a powerful OO-functional language
hybrid on top of it. They are trying to reify generics, implement C++-style
templates for primitives to avoid the high costs of autoboxing, and implement
arrays efficiently in a way that they play nicely with generics and the rest
of the language, just to name a few things that really the JVM should have
taken care of a long time ago. And, of course, Scala as a language is much
richer and more complex than Java ever will be.

Again, I hope Scala eventually succeeds in all of its ambitious goals and
begins being adopted for mainstream use, and I will continue to follow it and
hopefully find time to contribute to it. And, if you don't mind slogging
through a few bugs and flaky tools yourself, I highly recommend learning Scala
and consider it the best language on the JVM so far.

~~~
tcc619
I have been using Scala 2.8 for the past few months with Intellij 9 and it's
been free of any _major_ bugs. Definitely none of the unstable problems you
mentioned with the Eclipse plugin.

~~~
gtani
I've seen the IDEA plugin (Comm Edition 9, macbook pro, 4G RAM) slow to a
crawl with a pretty large lift repo until heap was increased to 1G.

