#004 — Scala 2.12: Changes Under the Hood

Hi, everyone!

Sorry for the short notice, but it's not every day that we have the chance to meet a Scala compiler hacker, so we're pretty stoked to have Lukas Rytz next week at Bucharest Scala. Details below.

Lukas Rytz — Scala 2.12: Changes Under the Hood

ABSTRACT: Scala 2.12 (RC2 will be released in the next couple days) mainly brings changes under the hood. The reason is that Scala 2.12 moves to Java 8, so it can take advantage of its new features, in particular new bytecodes. We will see how Scala 2.12 looks at the bytecode level and also dive a little bit into the JVM's internals.

Changing bytecode generation in the Scala compiler rarely goes without surprises: we will look at some of the difficulties we encountered along the way.

BIO: Lukas (https://twitter.com/lrytz) started hacking in Scala and on its compiler during his studies at EPFL and joined Martin Odersky's research lab in 2008. His PhD work was on type systems for effect tracking. During his time at EPFL he implemented Scala's support for named and default arguments and worked on various parts of the Scala language and compiler. He joined the Scala team at Lightbend in 2014, where he mainly worked on the new Java 8 bytecode encodings and the new optimizer for Scala 2.12.