Announcing Dotty 0.7.0 and 0.8.0-RC1

Allan Renucci

Today, we are excited to release Dotty versions 0.7.0 and 0.8.0-RC1. These releases serve as a technology preview that demonstrates new language features and the compiler supporting them.

Dotty is the project name for technologies that are considered for inclusion in Scala 3. Scala has pioneered the fusion of object-oriented and functional programming in a typed setting. Scala 3 will be a big step towards realizing the full potential of these ideas. Its main objectives are to

You can learn more about Dotty on our website.

This is our eighth scheduled release according to our 6-week release schedule. The previous technology preview simplified enums, introduced erased terms, improved IDE support and improved pattern matching for GADT.

What’s new in the 0.8.0-RC1 technology preview?

sbt 1 support #3872

Starting with Dotty 0.8.0, we will only support versions of sbt >= 1.1.4. Migrating to sbt 1 lets us use the new improved incremental compiler for Scala called Zinc, and enables integration with tools such as Bloop.

If you are already using Dotty with sbt 0.13, follow these simple steps to upgrade:

Unchecked warnings #4045

Dotty now emits unchecked warnings like scalac whenever a type test is performed but cannot be fully checked at runtime because of type erasure. For example:

scala> def foo(x: Any) = x.isInstanceOf[List[String]]
1 |def foo(x: Any) = x.isInstanceOf[List[String]]
  |                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  |               the type test for List[String] cannot be checked at runtime

In some cases, the Dotty compiler is smarter than scalac and will not emit a warning:

trait Marker

def foo[T](x: T) = x match {
  case _: T with Marker  => // scalac emits a spurious warning
  case _ =>
}

Kind Polymorphism #4108

Normally type parameters in Scala are partitioned into kinds. First-level types are types of values. Higher-kinded types are type constructors such as List or Map. The kind of a type is indicated by the top type of which it is a subtype. Normal types are subtypes of Any, covariant single argument type constructors such as List are subtypes of [+X] =>> Any, and the Map type constructor is a subtype of [X, +Y] =>> Any.

Sometimes we would like to have type parameters that can have more than one kind, for instance to define an implicit value that works for parameters of any kind. This is now possible through a form of (subtype) kind polymorphism. Kind polymorphism relies on the special type scala.AnyKind that can be used as an upper bound of a type.

def f[T <: AnyKind] = ..

The actual type arguments of f can then be types of arbitrary kinds. So the following would all be legal:

f[Int]
f[List]
f[Map]
f[[X] =>> String]

Note: This feature is considered experimental and is only enabled under a compiler flag (i.e. -Ykind-polymorphism). For more information, visit the Kind Polymorphism section of our documentation.

Improved support for SAM type #4152

This release includes fixes to SAM types that greatly improve interoperability with Java 8 lambdas. One can now easily write Scala code that uses Java streams:

val myList =
  java.util.Arrays.asList("a1", "a2", "b1", "c2", "c1")

myList
  .stream
  .filter(s => s.startsWith("c"))
  .map(_.toUpperCase)
  .sorted
  .forEach(println(_))

// prints:
// C1
// C2

Trying out Dotty

Scastie

Scastie, the online Scala playground, supports Dotty. This is an easy way to try Dotty without installing anything.

sbt

Using sbt 1.1.4 or newer, do:

sbt new lampepfl/dotty.g8

This will setup a new sbt project with Dotty as compiler. For more details on using Dotty with sbt, see the example project.

IDE support

It is very easy to start using the Dotty IDE in any Dotty project by following the IDE guide.

Standalone installation

Releases are available for download on the Releases section of the Dotty repository: https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/releases

We also provide a homebrew package that can be installed by running:

brew install lampepfl/brew/dotty

In case you have already installed Dotty via brew, you should instead update it:

brew upgrade dotty

Let us know what you think!

If you have questions or any sort of feedback, feel free to send us a message on our Gitter channel. If you encounter a bug, please open an issue on GitHub.

Contributing

Thank you to all the contributors who made this release possible!

According to git shortlog -sn --no-merges 0.7.0..0.8.0-RC1 these are:

    95  Martin Odersky
    91  liu fengyun
    91  Nicolas Stucki
    84  Allan Renucci
    73  Guillaume Martres
    67  Martin Duhem
    18  Jendrik Wenke
    16  Paolo G. Giarrusso
     8  Robert Stoll
     6  Thierry Treyer
     4  Aggelos Biboudis
     1  tokkiyaa
     1  Rajesh Veeranki
     1  Maxime Kjaer
     1  Saurabh Rawat
     1  Joan
     1  Jorge Vicente Cantero
     1  Jasper Moeys
     1  Piotr Gabara

If you want to get your hands dirty and contribute to Dotty, now is a good time to get involved! Head to our Getting Started page for new contributors, and have a look at some of the good first issues. They make perfect entry-points into hacking on the compiler.

We are looking forward to having you join the team of contributors.

Library authors: Join our community build

Dotty now has a set of widely-used community libraries that are built against every nightly Dotty snapshot. Currently this includes ScalaPB, algebra, scalatest, scopt and squants. Join our community build to make sure that our regression suite includes your library.