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by smitherfield
3321 days ago
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Yes, but they're unusually willing to make significant breaking changes in point releases as well — how many times now (including, IIRC, one or more ongoing efforts) have they rewritten the collections API? Yes, that's a standard library change, not a language change, but still. And this is a huge breaking change: if they make it you won't be able to convert your Scala 2.1X code to Dotty/Scala 3 by simply fixing all the compiler errors; you'll either need a foolproof automated conversion tool or to hand-audit your entire codebase. |
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They do make some other breaking changes in 2.xx releases (which come out about every 1.5 - 2 years!), but I wouldn't really call them point releases, given that the 2.x hasn't changed in over a decade - that's like saying Python shouldn't make breaking changes in Python 2.6 -> 2.7. They don't generally make breaking changes in actual point releases (2.XX.yy).
Also, they're building an automated conversion tool (https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2016/10/24/scalafix.html) for Dotty. As I said, compare this to Python 3. The Scala -> Dotty rewriter should be able to be more complete than 2to3 was however, mostly because they're not fixing many ambiguities like 2to3 was with encoding. Their rewriter is also based on a full sophisticated framework that can parse or unparse multiple versions of Scala, including Dotty, in one build.
Hopefully being able to rewrite a much, much higher percentage of code and the backporting of changes into Scala 2.13+ will make Dotty adoption happen faster (than Python 3) when it comes.