How to create annotations and get them in scala

Question

I want to define some annotations and use them in Scala.

I looked into the source of Scala, found in scala.annotation package, there are some annotations like tailrec, switch, elidable, and so on. So I defined some annotations as them do:

class A extends StaticAnnotation

@A
class X {
    @A
    def aa() {}
}

Then I write a test:

object Main {
    def main(args: Array[String]) {
        val x = new X
        println(x.getClass.getAnnotations.length)
        x.getClass.getAnnotations map { println }
    }
}

It prints some strange messages:

1
@scala.reflect.ScalaSignature(bytes=u1" !1* 1!AbCaE
9"a!Q!! 1gn!!.<b    iBPE*,7
    Ii#)1oY1mC&1'G.Y(cUGCa#=S:LGO/AA!A  1mI!)

Seems I can't get the annotation aaa.A.

How can I create annotations in Scala correctly? And how to use and get them?

Answer 1

FWIW, you can now define scala annotation in scala 2.10 and use reflection to read them back.

Here are some examples: Reflecting Annotations in Scala 2.10

Answer 2

Could it have something to do with retention? I bet @tailrec is not included in the bytecode getting generated.

If I try to extend ClassfileAnnotation (in order to have runtime retention), Scala tells me that it can't be done, and it has to be done in Java:

./test.scala:1: warning: implementation restriction: subclassing Classfile does not
make your annotation visible at runtime.  If that is what
you want, you must write the annotation class in Java.
class A extends ClassfileAnnotation
      ^