Speeding scalac: Partial Compilation in sbt

Mark Harrah joins us on Saturday afternoon, July 18 to talk about his project sbt (simple-build-tool) (https://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/).

Good partial recompilation forms the foundation of sbt, a build tool for Scala, written in Scala, that uses Scala for build definitions. Compilation in Scala is currently a trade-off between speed and correctness. Partial recompilation is a common technique used to speed up compiles by only recompiling a subset of all sources in a project.

In the first half of his presentation, Mark will discuss the main variants of partial recompilation, including dependency tracking for better accuracy. In the second half of he'll explain the benefits to using and the motivation behind writing such a build tool. Be assured that they are many and varied!