The big news in Scala at the moment is the announcement of the Typelevel fork of Scala.
We’re delighted. There’ll be more emphasis on typed functional programming styles, which brings benefit to projects.
Some have expressed concern this will fragment the Scala community. Both Typelevel and Typesafe have made clear their intentions to avoid fragmentation.
Typelevel have expressed their commitment to keeping their changes merge compatible with the Typesafe compiler, to retain binary compatibility, and to focus on conservative extensions to Scala that fix known issues. The net result is that libraries built with either compiler should interoperate seemlessly.
Typesafe, in their response, have confirmed their openness to merging back changes made in the Typelevel fork.
The fork is the headline, but there’s a important longer term message. Typelevel call for everyone to “collaborate on the creation of an independent, non-profit, open source foundation to safeguard the interests of the entire Scala community”.
An independent foundation can balance the needs of the Scala community with that of Scala businesses.
We’re going to support and contribute however we best can.