The Scala Compiler Corner

[Miguel Garcia]

Hi,

After two months of build-up, I want to bring to your attention

The Scala Compiler Corner

http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/people/mi.garcia/ScalaCompilerCorner/

a growing collection of resources on how the Scala compiler works (and
how it can be hacked).

Besides write-ups on the implementation of built-in compilation
phases, you'll find resources to write your own compiler plugins to
perform additional or alternative processing on the syntax trees.

Contributions are very welcome!

Miguel Garcia
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/people/mi.garcia/

[Kevin Wright]

Sweeter than a sweet thing with and extra helping of especially sweet sugar on top :)

2010/1/2 Miguel Garcia <mgarc...@yahoo.com>

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[Michael Neale]

Thanks Miguel.

I do often feel that the scala compiler is a tad slow (more that javac
and JDT are fast) - have other people noticed and do you know what is
being done about it? I appreciate the cleverness of the scala
compiler, but if the downside is slower turn around for me, I am less
excited about its innovations :(

[kirk]

Hi Michael,

I've profiled the Scala compiler for Bill Venners and have passed the
information back. Scala compiler is slow because 1) it is single
threaded. I would have thought that a language/runtime that was tuned
for threading would have a multi-threaded compiler ;-) 2) the symbol
table backed by a hashmap will resize several 100s of thousands of time
for any application of any reasonable size. So, GC is a problem. To make
the compile a bit faster 1) use a larger heap and 2) make sure you're
using iCMS.

Regards,
Kirk

[Miguel Garcia]

The reasons sketched above depict quite accurately why scalac is slow.
Looking into the future, there's a discussion on how scalac could be
faster at:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala.internals/2692

Miguel
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/people/mi.garcia