The Scala Team at Lightbend (formerly Typesafe) is happy to join in announcing the foundation of the Scala Center!
As Lightbend CEO Mark Brewer mentioned in a recent blog post, Scala is bigger than any one company. For many years, we have been talking with EPFL about the benefits of launching a foundation in support of Scala. Today, I am pleased to announce that Lightbend joins Goldman Sachs, IBM, Nitro and Verizon as founding members of this new, independent, non-profit foundation based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Scala Center will act as an open source foundation for Scala. It will engage with developers in the open-source community in the effort to improve the language, its tools and its documentation. It will also help developers learn the language through massive open online courses, seminars and other activities.
Our team at Lightbend will continue to spearhead the development of the Scala compiler and standard library, bringing cutting-edge language design to working programmers. As the leading contributors to Scala’s core, we would like to take this opportunity to recap our past work and share our thoughts on Scala’s immediate future.
In Scala 2.11 we emphasized a smooth upgrade experience, a modularized standard library, and an overall great experience from your first interactive session in the REPL to contributing your first Scala documentation improvement or bug fix. For Scala 2.12 we’re rewriting the back-end to take full advantage of Java 8's new features as well as to bring you a new optimizer that performs much deeper static analysis to eliminate the overhead of higher-order code patterns common in functional programming.
Once Scala 2.12 is feature complete – the team is working hard to complete the work in March – we’ll publish the next milestone. We hope you’ll give it a try and report back, so that we can iron out any issues not caught by the community build in time for the first release candidate (due June 30th).
With input from our co-founding members at the Scala Center, we will refine the Scala 2.13 roadmap in the second half of this year. We aim to simplify the collections library while maintaining source compatibility with most ordinary code that uses collections. We're committed to evolving the Scala platform and keeping it vital while providing our users with a clear, smooth upgrade path.
Finally, I'd like to thank you, our users and contributors, for making Scala what it is today! I look forward to continue shaping Scala's future with you in collaboration with the Scala Center.
Adriaan Moors, for the Scala Team at Lightbend:
Lukas Rytz
Seth Tisue
Jason Zaugg
Stefan Zeiger