Scala appears extremely bloated for a first-time user

[tarsa]

@venkat

That “project” folder has a “target” folder inside it with similar contents as the “target” folder at the same level.

That’s because a project definition in SBT is itself a Scala project and that can be nested several levels deep: sbt Reference Manual — Organizing the build Where I work, we actually exploit that for automatic dependencies resolution (i.e. I wrote some sbt plugins that require recursive project definitions).

@venkat

Both “target” folders have “streams” folders in them which contribute to most of the total 314 items in the project you have built (after sbt package).

It looks like these streams are used for debugging purposes, when build fails: sbt Reference Manual — Tasks

@venkat

How is this project structure (and streams) meaningful for a hello-world project?

Usually the files that are produced from your source code and that are going to be needed when deploying your application are located in target/classes folders.

@venkat

What’s going on here? Why was the build stuff allowed to be so overly complicated? I knew the build is getting complicated when people moved from Ant to Maven, but didn’t expect it to get this much worse. I thought Scala build has just one job to do - just do what javac does, and produce a class file. Is there a way to keep it that simple?

sbt is the counterpart of Maven. The counterpart of javac is scalac. scalac is included in standalone Scala package. You can download that using e.g. coursier Single command Scala setup - Alex Archambault or by using link at the bottom of Redirecting… :

The (big) disadvantage is that scalac alone won’t help you with dependency management and lots of other stuff related to building projects. Therefore I recommend to stick to sbt, just like Java programmers should stick to Maven rather than invoking javac themselves.