[timclark]

If it compiles faster than Scala I will use it!

From reading the language specs it seems much more pragmatic than Scala (as does ceylon http://www.ceylon-lang.org/ or fantom http://fantom.org/).

I think if JetBrains thought that Scala was a better Java they would be using it instead of creating their own language.

[verroq]

It's unfortunate that Scala is fatally flawed because it was bound to the JVM. Having java interop is both a blessing and a curse. The sheer scale of the language implemented as a java library pretty crippled compile time.

[guard-of-terra]

Why do you link being based on JVM and long compile times?

Java is one of the fastest languages to compile (1000 files with ten megs worth of code would take something under 10 seconds), while C++ and Haskell are both very slow to compile even if they're not JVM based.

[verroq]

The specific way Scala is bound to the JVM (as a 8mb class library that needs to be loaded every time) is the reason it is slow to compile and by implication, slow-er startup.

I suppose we do need to take account of language features. C++ is a difficult language to parse, and with a bit of template magic, and heavy compiler optimizations that can be applied. Haskell has type inference and is statically typed, that has to cost it some what.

Scala has a 8mb JVM library to load, and also type inference. It gets a double whammy. However I'm willing to bet is the JVM is contributing a significant portion of startup time, with both JVM startup time, loading java libraries, then loading scala library. If the JVM wasn't part of the problem, then there is no need for people to create tools like fsc to speed up compile time.

[timclark]

Plain old Java compiles way faster than Scala I don't believe the JVM is the main contributor to the slowdown.

Scala compilation is complex, partly due to its extremely sophisticated type system, it is also quite resource intensive - I have got the type checker to run out of memory on multiple occasions I have never seen a Java compilation fail due to lack of memory. fsc and incremental compilation do speed things up but it is still slower than compiling an equivalent amount of Java.

[e-dragoev]

Then just use fsc instead of scalac. It is part of the standard Scala distribution. Last time I tried it - fsc was not that much slower than javac.

[_ea1k]

Yes, but is it faster than EJC? I'd bet that's the frame of reference for most Java devs.

[thebluesky]

Since Kotlin runs on the JVM surely it's also "fatally flawed" by your reckoning?

Scala also targets LLVM: http://greedy.github.com/scala-llvm/ and .NET: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10299

[cgbystrom]

The authors of Kotlin has explicitly said that fast compilation is a key feature.

[thebluesky]

It's also one of the key features of Turbo Pascal.