4 ms·

More thoughts on switching back to Java from Scala

21 points by Adrock 16y ago

pragmatic 16y ago
I built a small game engine in Scala. Coming from C#, I felt right at home, many of the advanced features of C# transferred over. All in all, I had a pleasant experience. The issues: - The tools aren't ready for primetime. Scala is a very complex language. I can only imagine the man hours needed to develop a IDE that _really_ understands Scala. - Scala's Complexity Most of the time, I could handle this alright. But sometimes the sheer number of possibilities was daunting. It seems like the features and libraries need to be culled. Possibly it's just the result of trying to blend OOP with Functional programming. What surprised me the most is - most of the time it worked. I think I would still pick Scala over Java. Especially with better tooling support.
curtis 16y ago
IDE support is certainly a major problem with Scala development right now, but it's not the biggest one. By far the biggest problem is how incredibly slow the Scala compiler is. My project has a whopping 10 Scala files. To recompile them after a one line change takes something on the order of 26 seconds. It is possible to reduce this time down to 4 or 5 seconds using fsc (the Scala daemon compiler), but getting fsc to work reliably with Maven is a problem I haven't solved yet. Even 4 or 5 seconds for a one line change to a project with 10 files is just wrong. What, are we back in 1992?
- whakojacko 16y ago
  "It is possible to reduce this time down to 4 or 5 seconds using fsc (the Scala daemon compiler), but getting fsc to work reliably with Maven is a problem I haven't solved yet" Have you looked into sbt? It has nice iterative complication support, among other things. It is (IMO) far superior to work with than ant or maven.
  - curtis 16y ago
    This particular project seems to be pretty heavily invested in Maven, so migrating might not be very easy. At least as importantly, it's not really my project.
michaelcampbell 16y ago
Ah, Cedric. While I generally enjoy his blog posts, his anti-(everything but java) stance is wearing a bit thin.
- tristan_juricek 16y ago
  That's not entirely fair; he's been consistently critical of Scala, but seems to like Fantom. While he may have added that note at the bottom of this article, I swear I've read that opinion of his more than once.

21 points by Adrock 16y ago

I built a small game engine in Scala. Coming from C#, I felt right at home, many of the advanced features of C# transferred over. All in all, I had a pleasant experience. The issues: - The tools aren't ready for primetime. Scala is a very complex language. I can only imagine the man hours needed to develop a IDE that _really_ understands Scala. - Scala's Complexity Most of the time, I could handle this alright. But sometimes the sheer number of possibilities was daunting. It seems like the features and libraries need to be culled. Possibly it's just the result of trying to blend OOP with Functional programming. What surprised me the most is - most of the time it worked. I think I would still pick Scala over Java. Especially with better tooling support.

curtis 16y ago

IDE support is certainly a major problem with Scala development right now, but it's not the biggest one. By far the biggest problem is how incredibly slow the Scala compiler is. My project has a whopping 10 Scala files. To recompile them after a one line change takes something on the order of 26 seconds. It is possible to reduce this time down to 4 or 5 seconds using fsc (the Scala daemon compiler), but getting fsc to work reliably with Maven is a problem I haven't solved yet. Even 4 or 5 seconds for a one line change to a project with 10 files is just wrong. What, are we back in 1992?

whakojacko 16y ago
"It is possible to reduce this time down to 4 or 5 seconds using fsc (the Scala daemon compiler), but getting fsc to work reliably with Maven is a problem I haven't solved yet" Have you looked into sbt? It has nice iterative complication support, among other things. It is (IMO) far superior to work with than ant or maven.
- curtis 16y ago
  This particular project seems to be pretty heavily invested in Maven, so migrating might not be very easy. At least as importantly, it's not really my project.

michaelcampbell 16y ago

Ah, Cedric. While I generally enjoy his blog posts, his anti-(everything but java) stance is wearing a bit thin.

tristan_juricek 16y ago
That's not entirely fair; he's been consistently critical of Scala, but seems to like Fantom. While he may have added that note at the bottom of this article, I swear I've read that opinion of his more than once.