Scala in its recent announcement suggested the roadmap for Scala 3.0 and what features developers can expect in Scala 3. Following this, the Scala community also announced the new release will be Scala 2.13 and mentioned that Scala 3 will succeed Scala 2.13. With the first official talk about Scala 3, the community also unveiled its secret project called Dotty. It announced that Dotty will become Scala 3. Dotty is a set of compiler technology for Scala.
The suggested timeline for the preview release of Scala 3.0 is around early 2020. With this development, the community has suggested that Scala 2.13, expected to release in few months, will be an important release for migration to Scala 3.
What can you expect in Scala 3?
The community is working to fuse two big paradigms: Object-Oriented programming and functional programming together to make development more convenient in Scala ecosystem. Alongside this ongoing improvement, the community is focussing on the following aspects:
- With Scala 3, the community is emphasizing on 4 main features of Scala: consistency, safety, ergonomics, and performance. The community is working on adding types and operators to carry out these functionalities.
- In Scala 3 expect advanced programming paradigms like metaprogramming and generative programming. Currently, the macro systems are implemented at an experimental level to carry out metaprogramming. The community has suggested replacing the macro system with some other solution. Generative programming design with scala is currently under development.
- Improvement in Scala tools for building strong foundations for software design. Also removal of some components of the language that are rarely used to make the language lightweight.
- Automatic rewriting through the scalafix tool for efficient migration of code from Scala 2 to Scala 3.
- Updated Scala compiler, IDE plugins, REPL, Scaladoc, and build tools. The community is working on updating the Dotty plugins and its standard build tools SBT for working properly with Scala 3.
Scala 3 will share the same standard library used in Scala 2. However, with the update, Scala 3 will not be binary compatible with Scala 2 because of the update in Scala compiler. The community is working on making the migration as smooth as possible which makes the release of Scala 2.14 pivotal. To get an early preview of Scala 3 features, developers can start working on the development of Dotty, available on the GitHub repository and report any issues on the issues page.
