Why are so few things @specialized in Scala's standard library?

Question

I've searched for the use of @specialized in the source code of the standard library of Scala 2.8.1. It looks like only a handful of traits and classes use this annotation: Function0, Function1, Function2, Tuple1, Tuple2, Product1, Product2, AbstractFunction0, AbstractFunction1, AbstractFunction2.

None of the collection classes are @specialized. Why not? Would this generate too many classes?

This means that using collection classes with primitive types is very inefficient, because there will be a lot of unnecessary boxing and unboxing going on.

What's the most efficient way to have an immutable list or sequence (with IndexedSeq characteristics) of Ints, avoiding boxing and unboxing?

Answer 1

Specialization has a high cost on the size of classes, so it must be added with careful consideration. In the particular case of collections, I imagine the impact will be huge.

Still, it is an on-going effort -- Scala library has barely started to be specialized.