Scala on the CLR

Question

The Scala homepage says that Scala 1.4 was runnable on the .NET framework - what is the status of Scala on the CLR now? Is anyone working on it? I think it would make a great GUI tool combined with GTK# and Mono...

Answer 1

Presently, it is not working. However, there is some funding (I heard Microsoft, but I have no confirmation) to get it working on the CLR, so there's an on-going effort, which seems to be aiming at basic functionality available by the time Scala 2.8 is out.

By "basic" I mean it should run and produce code, but there's not going to be much CLR-specific tests, and it shouldn't take any advantage of CLR-specific features or libraries.

At any rate, at the moment, it is not abandoned.

EDIT: Here is a specific reference to the fact it's not abandoned. This is a snippet from one of the regular progress reports the Scala team sends to the Scala Internals mailing list. I picked this one simply because it's the most recent one mentioning it (12 days ago at the time I'm writing this), but anyone looking at them will see this has been referred to regularly on the reports of the first semester of 2010.

Scala Meeting 2010-05-04

People attending the meeting: Ingo, Miguel, Donna, Adriaan, Iulian, Phil, Lukas, Philipp, Toni, Gilles, Martin, Hubert, Tiark.

• Current work
  • cleanups in remote actors and concurrent.opts, documentation for actors
  • fixes with named arguments
  • general bug fixing
  • work on scaladoc
  • work on .NET