Question

I’ve written a rather large program in Scala 2.7.5, and now I’m looking forward to version 2.8. But I’m curious about how this big leap in the evolution of Scala will affect me.

What will be the biggest differences between these two versions of Scala? And perhaps most importantly:

• Will I need to rewrite anything?
• Do I want to rewrite anything just to take advantage of some cool new feature?
• What exactly are the new features of Scala 2.8 in general?

Answer 1

You can find here a preview of new feature in Scala2.8 (April 2009), completed with recent this article (June 2009)

• Named and Default Arguments
• Nested Annotations
• Package Objects
• @specialized
• Improved Collections (some rewrite might be needed here)
• REPL will have command completion (more on that and other tricks in this article)
• New Control Abstractions (continuation or break)
• Enhancements (Swing wrapper, performances, …)

“Rewriting code” is not an obligation (except for using some of the improved Collections), but some features like continuation (Wikipedia: an abstract representation of the control state, or the “rest of computation” or “rest of code to be executed”) can give you some new ideas. A good introduction is found here, written by Daniel (who has also posted a much more detailed and specific answer in this thread).

Note: Scala on Netbeans seems to work with some 2.8 nightly-build (vs. the official page for 2.7.x)