Typesafe welcomes the work that Miles Sabin and the other Typelevel founders will be undergoing with Typesafe and the rest of the Scala community to improve and enhance the Scala compiler.
Typesafe is fully committed to the open source development model. Today’s announcement is a prime example of the power of open source and the benefit that comes from a passionate community, beyond what any one individual or company can deliver (if you haven't read it yet, please take a look at Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem).
The Scala language had been developed in the open for more than 10 years. It’s today being used in major enterprises, startups, research efforts, and personal projects. It is one of the few languages that combines widespread industrial adoption with cutting edge language research. This has led to a number of benefits, but also differing needs, desires, and priorities. There's a natural tension between the industry's need for stability and the advanced user community's desire for innovation.
Typesafe has focused on improving stability, simplicity, and performance of the Scala language based on the feedback from the broader community and our beliefs that improving these areas will open the Scala language to a broader audience. This has not always been easy. Balancing the disparity between providing what newcomers and enterprise shops need, and what some of the more advanced users in the Scala community want has proven to be a tough problem to solve.
We’ve been talking to Miles Sabin and the Typelevel contributors about their intention to fork Scala and support their initiatives to define a solution. We believe that a model where a stable main branch of the Scala language and compiler is complemented by more advanced and experimental branches can serve the needs of innovators and industrial adopters alike. We applaud the intention of the Typelevel people to keep their branch merge compatible with standard Scala, and are very open to integrate new features that have proven themselves in future releases of Scala. In fact a lot of the engineering Typesafe puts into the Scala platform is about providing a robust and extensible basis for such future enhancements.
We have recently released our roadmap for Scala's evolution. We will work closely with the Scala community to move Scala and its ecosystem forward.
-Martin Odersky, Chairman & Co-Founder at Typesafe
