The second edition of Scala Highlights, a newsletter showcasing technical achievements, online resources, and community news, is available.
The newsletter is a joint effort by the Scala Center, LAMP, Akka, and VirtusLab, the four core organizations involved in the Scala language development. It also covers our collaborations with other parties, such as the Scala Center’s advisory board.
A few of the highlights covered in this issue:
Scala 3.3 will continue to receive support for at least a year after 3.9 is out, giving the community time to migrate the ecosystem.
“At least a year” is hardly “long term support”. I hope that was a misstatement!
It is all according to the strategy announced 3 years ago - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/08/17/long-term-compatibility-plans.html
At least 3 years of active support which we’re currently having is in my opinion a good balance, when taking into account the size of compiler team and their resources. Premier support of upcoming JDK 25 is roughly 5 years.
The compiler codebase is diverging making the backports from Scala Next to LTS more and more time consuming. I believe it would not be a problem to continue doing backports to the 3.3 LTS if there exists interested body that can contribute workforce or founds to do so.
Another alternative is that after end of current LTS period of Scala 3.3 somewhere in first half of 2027 (so 4 years after 3.3.0 release) it’s maintenance can be reduced to the status of current Scala 2.12 - only JDK compatibility upgrades and some critical bugfixes. Scala 2.12 was released 9 years ago, it’s still getting some patch releases once in a while.
Note that Scala 3.3.0 came out in May 2023; that’s the point I think it’s appropriate to measure from.