Since I’ve seen no mention of this in Planet Scala (although it was discussed in #scala), here are some Scala-related links from the JVM Languages summit:

  • Optimizing Higher-Order Functions in Scala by Iulian Dragos. I haven’t tried the various optimisation flags in scalac yet, but I am curious if they will have any effect in the primitive collections with scala benchmark from a previous blog entry. These flags have been a bit buggy in the past, but hopefully recent fixes have solved the problems.
  • Scalify: Automatic translation from Java to Scala by Paul Phillips. This tool looks very interesting because the approach used is a lot more sophisticated than jatran. I have been meaning to take a look at it, but all of my code uses generics and it doesn’t support that yet.
  • Cliff Click’s post-Summit blog entry. It includes a link to the slides for his talk, “Fast Bytecodes for Funny Languages”. Scala is one of the languages covered (although very briefly) with the results coming from the translation of a simple Java micro-benchmark to Scala available here (in the comments). As expected, Scala can generate bytecode that is pretty much the same as Java if low-level constructs are used, but the performance suffers quite a bit if idiomatic Scala is used while dealing with primitives (at least with the default compilation flags).

For more general coverage of the summit:

Ricky Clarkson mentioned on IRC that videos of the talks will be made available on InfoQ and Google Video.

Update: John Rose’s post-summit blog entry is a nice round-up.