The Scala homepage says that Scala 1.4 was runnable on the .NET framework - what is the status of Scala on the CLR now? Is anyone working on it? I think it would make a great GUI tool combined with GTK# and Mono...
+2
A:
Given that Scala on the JVM is at version 2.7 (and 2.8 is imminent), I don't believe this is being maintained.
See also this StackOverflow question (from April 2009), which has more details.
Brian Agnew
2009-12-13 21:33:08
+4
A:
The status of Scala on the CLR is... shabby. Unless they've worked heavily on it since 2.7.3 (and there's no evidence of this in the changelogs, though I haven't actually tested it), it:
- only runs against .NET 1.1 (!)
- outputs IL assembler which you then have to ilasm by hand (!)
- is missing several language and library features (like structural types and parser combinators)
It's being maintained to the extent that they're continuing to merge revisions from the Java compiler into the MSIL compiler, but other than that I'd say it's moribund.
itowlson
2009-12-13 21:47:17
+3
A:
Presently, it is not working. However, there is some funding (I heard Microsoft, but I have no confirmation) to get it working on the CLR, so there's an on-going effort, which seems to be aiming at basic functionality available by the time Scala 2.8 is out.
By "basic" I mean it should run and produce code, but there's not going to be much CLR-specific tests, and it shouldn't take any advantage of CLR-specific features or libraries.
At any rate, at the moment, it is not abandoned.
EDIT: Here is a specific reference to the fact it's not abandoned. This is a snippet from one of the regular progress reports the Scala team sends to the Scala Internals mailing list. I picked this one simply because it's the most recent one mentioning it (12 days ago at the time I'm writing this), but anyone looking at them will see this has been referred to regularly on the reports of the first semester of 2010.
Scala Meeting 2010-05-04
People attending the meeting: Ingo, Miguel, Donna, Adriaan, Iulian, Phil, Lukas, Philipp, Toni, Gilles, Martin, Hubert, Tiark.
- Current work
- cleanups in remote actors and concurrent.opts, documentation for actors
- fixes with named arguments
- general bug fixing
- work on scaladoc
- work on .NET
Daniel
2009-12-13 23:44:54
If it is not abandoned, is there any information about the project on the Internet?
Michał Bendowski
2009-12-14 15:48:32
Sure. It has been mentioned on the list scala-internals, archives for which can be found on Nabble.
Daniel
2009-12-14 21:49:32
Do you cite any specific references? Everything I can find suggests that Scala.NET has been abandoned and only ever supported .NET 1.1 (which is 7 years out of date!) anyway.
Jon Harrop
2010-05-16 23:16:11
@Jon Sure, I'll add a reference to the answer.
Daniel
2010-05-17 14:54:37
At the ScalaDays keynote last month, Martin said, "One thing we are working on is a reimplementation of Scala on .NET. We have started again to work on a native Scala compiler on .NET and a Visual Studio plugin.That work is actually funded by Microsoft and I hope we have something to show you this year for that."http://days2010.scala-lang.org/node/138/137
Matt R
2010-05-17 15:58:34
+1
A:
It's also probably worth noting that the advent of F# has limited Microsoft's interest in Scala, in that they now have a "blessed" functional language of their own. NIH.
Brendan W. McAdams
2009-12-14 23:08:06
An understatement now: F# is a supported Microsoft product and a first-class language on .NET next to C# and VB.
Jon Harrop
2010-05-16 20:34:54