[vorg]

> I find it one of the most promising things about Scala -- it is not determined to become an instant boat anchor by committing to early decisions that are later revealed to be suboptimal, or outright mistakes.

The fact that Scala uses the JVM, with a hacky workaround for type erasure, is suboptimal.

[Lewisham]

Depends on what is suboptimal to you. If "suboptimal" is "not optimal for the perfect programming language", then sure. If "suboptimal" is "not optimal for real world use", then no.

Scala's interop with Java libraries has been a huge, huge boon, and undoubtedly drove take-up where there otherwise would have been none. Scala has come this far in a decade. Python is 20 years old. Ruby is 16. Scala came a long way in a short time, and was probably resigned to the dustbin of "that would have been cool" languages without that interop.

[gaius]

The Scala team have plans afoot to target LLVM and .NET too.

[stonemetal]

Do they have actual plans though? There has been talk of .NET support since the beginning. Basically I wouldn't hold my breath.

[cageface]

Unless they get significant outside help I'm very skeptical that we'll see a usable Scala on LLVM or .NET any time soon. The core Scala team is very talented but they seem to have their hands full with the JVM version.

[illicium]

Scala already compiles to the CLR, but support for it is nowhere near that for the JVM.

[ppog]

Last time I looked (early 2009), Scala compilation to the CLR was a bit of a joke. It targeted version 1.1 of the CLR, which had been superseded nearly 4 years earlier. I think the problem was with the predefined libraries. Supposedly you could get it to work with v2 but I never did.

They also did themselves no favours by having the Scala compiler dump out MSIL assembler code rather than a .NET assembly. You had to separately run the ilasm tool to get an executable. Obviously for a production environment you'd package this up in a build file, but for experimenting with the language it was a bit of a speed bump.

This is without even looking at the language features and libraries that were supported on the JVM but not on the CLR (e.g. structural types, parser combinators).

My experience may be out of date here, but the scala-lang page on .NET support is still datestamped July 2008, so I'm not too optimistic. A great pity, as Scala always seemed a great fit for the CLR and would provide some nice competition to C# and F#.

[contextfree]

This looks pretty active: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~magarcia/ScalaNET/

I'm not sure what relation his work has to the core Scala project or team, though.

[gaius]

See http://greedy.github.com/scala/