It's not limited to Scala though. Google copied the limits of their .dex file format from Java .class files, except that the limit is (of course) per class in

It's not limited to Scala though. Google copied the limits of their .dex file format from Java .class files, except that the limit is (of course) per class in Java, while it is per application on Android. People could have expected that they didn't do something this stupid, but hey, saving two bytes per .dex file was more important I guess. They still haven't fixed this. The thing fixed in Jellybean was a different bug in their code where they didn't deduplicate parent interface types.