[s4vi0r]

Depending on when you were using Scala, it could have to do with abuse of implicits; back in like 2012/2013ish there we a bit of a craze with using implicits everywhere which would make any sort of IDEs job incredibly tough and compilation painfully slow. I write Scala in Emacs at the moment so I can't speak to intellij but Emacs certainly isn't the fastest editor around and I've yet to run into major issues.

The core team also finally realized how important tooling is and recently dedicated a team (a bunch of teams?) to working on language server based intelllisense which is nice.

I'd highly encourage anybody who last used Scala a while ago and didn't enjoy it to give it another shot at some point in the future. Lots of improvements over the past few years (and some really cool stuff coming up with Scala 3) make Scala IMO easily one the best languages around.

[Rapzid]

It was within the past 6 months and I was up-to-date on IDEA and Scala. I was running it on OSX though, so that may have had something to do with it.. It's hard to recall, but I may have run this by another team member and he didn't think it was unusual. Perhaps Microsoft has just spoiled me with C#, F#, and TypeScript tooling :|

[hocuspocus]

Firstly, IDEA's default JVM settings are a bit conservative. The default 750MB maximum heap size is too low for any non-trivial Scala project. Here's someone who attempts to explain all settings: https://github.com/FoxxMD/intellij-jvm-options-explained

Secondly, IDEA's SBT plugin works pretty well, use it if that's not the case yet, and put a reasonable .jvmopts file in your project. SBT can still be slow and there no magic cure for that (even though it's constantly improving). Some of my coworkers use bloop instead: https://scalacenter.github.io/bloop/

That said, Scala is indeed jumping on the LSP bandwagon, and it's already supported by Dotty out of the box.