Last week, the Scala Center was created as a not-for-profit foundation, along with a list of financial backers, to improve the ongoing development of Scala and provide training courses based around the Scala language. Its aims are:
- To independently guide and support the Scala community
- To co-ordinate and develop open source libraries and tools for the benefit of all Scala users
- To provide deep, and quality, educational materials for Scala
In a blog post on the Scala language site, Martin Odersky and Heather Miller describe the structure of the center, which is a designated unit within the existing EPFL, although independent from the existing LAMP programming methods laboratory which continues to do future language research. The founding members of the Scala center include Heather Miller and Jon Pretty as the two officers as well as Lightbend and other commercial partners.
Martin will continue to experiment with compilers and languages, including working on Dotty, an experimental next generation Scala compiler while Lightbend and others will maintain the existing Scala codebase and libraries. According to Lightbend, the Scala 2.12 build is feature complete and will publish the next milestone for the end of March, and they are aiming for a release candidate due for June 30th.
The Scala 2.12 release uses an entirely new backend and requires Java 8, with tight integration with Java 8 lambdas and streams. There's a future roadmap for Scala 2.13 as well, which is aimed for the second half of 2016. There will also be a new Scala mini-degree offered on Coursera, including courses by Martin Odersky, Viktor Kuncak, Aleksander Prokopec and Heather Miller. More information about the course can be found at the Scala center page.
