3 ms·
Not as fast as Go, but straight compilation is about ~3x faster than 2015, with many improvements around incrementality and IDE speed that make things a lot bet
by lihaoyi 6y ago
Not as fast as Go, but straight compilation is about ~3x faster than 2015, with many improvements around incrementality and IDE speed that make things a lot better. Compilation still isn't "as fast as Go", but has probably approached "acceptable" now in 2021.
As one data point, "slow Scala compiles" was the #1 biggest developer complaint at my company when I joined in 2017, and nowadays that complaint doesn't even break the top 10. Scala compiles are not great, but not terrible.
A lot about Scala sucked in 2015, and I wouldn't recommend 2015 Scala to anyone, but it's not 2015 any more. 2021 Scala is what I'm talking about
- harryh 6y agoThis is super interesting. I was a pretty early adopter of Scala, but our org grew fairly frustrated with in in 2013/14 due to the slow compiler. We invested a ton of effort into building tools to mitigate this problem (effort we'd rather have spent on our actual business). I haven't really touched it beyond tiny toy projects since 2015 though. Really glad to hear that compilation speed has gotten so much better.
- lihaoyi 6y agoYeah the effort to speed up compilation around Scala 2.12 really took off. You can see it in the compiler benchmarks: https://scala-ci.typesafe.com/grafana/dashboard/db/scala-benchmark?orgId=1&from=now-5y&to=now https://scala-ci.typesafe.com/grafana/dashboard/db/scala-ben... Where the better-files library went from taking ~700ms to compile in 2016 to ~230ms today. Definitely a huge improvement that our developers appreciate every day!
- finiteloops 6y agoNot to mention how much Mill improved my dev cycle. Thank you for your contribution to the ecosystem!
- danmur 6y agoYep. I'm just a scala hobbyist but I'd have given up if I had to use SBT.
- cutler 6y agoBut is a bit better than dog-slow actually that great?