The Scala Center in 2021
Another year has passed, and it is time to look back at what we achieved at the Scala Center. And what a year it has been!
For starters, 2021 will be long remembered for the release of Scala 3. During the second half of 2020, and until the release of Scala 3.0.0 on May 14, 2021, the Scala Center was overseeing all the efforts about Scala 3. Bringing together people from LAMP/EPFL, VirtusLab, Lightbend, and from the open source community, all under the common objective of releasing Scala 3 along with core tooling and libraries, was a tremendous endeavour. We are proud to have been a part of this process, and grateful for the involvement of everyone.
Around the compiler, 2021 saw two other noteworthy milestones. First, the release of Scala Native v0.4.0, with numerous improvements, bug fixes, and most importantly, the start of more frequent backward binary compatible releases, including another release bringing Windows support. Second, the release of Scala.js 1.7.0, which was the first time that the core Scala.js project had zero known issues at the time of release.
Most of our activity revolves around tooling for Scala developers. 2021 was a great year for Metals, the LSP-based IDE for Scala. One landmark feature was the support for the debugger through the Debug Adapter Protocol, including expression evaluation. We were particularly involved in the development of sbt as well, with notably the addition of built-in support for the Build Server Protocol, allowing for native interaction with IDEs. Other noteworthy projects were Scala3-migrate, a revamp of Scaladex, sbt-version-policy, and the TASTy reader for Scala 2.
On the education side of our Center, our biggest project this year was a new course, entitled Effective Programming in Scala. It was released together with Scala 3, and was the first of our courses to be published for the new version of the language. It was later followed by two of our existing courses, updated and improved for Scala 3. Second, we revived the involvement of the Scala organization in Google Summer of Code, with 4 successful projects. Another major work was a redesign and polish of the Scala documentation website. Finally, to complement our existing participation in conferences, we started recording and publishing videos about Scala, its tools, and its ecosystem. The first series was called "Let's talk about Scala 3" and currently has more than 16.5k+ views and 750 likes.
On the corporate membership side, we welcomed Databricks in our advisory board, and Swissborg as one of our affiliate members.?If you are interested in joining too, check out more here: https://scala.epfl.ch/corporate-membership.html?.
Finally, 2021 saw us coming on LinkedIn! We look forward to interacting here for the years to come. Exciting content is coming your way.
2021 was a great year. Thank you to all the people who have been a part of it in the Scala community. We look forward to 2022!