scala compiler plugins

[scala solist]

Is there any relevant list of available scala plugins? I'm interested what kind of things they add to user experience.

[Seth Tisue]

There's https://wiki.scala-lang.org/display/SW/Tools+and+Libraries. A number of entries mention that they are compiler plugins.

[scala solist]

It is marked outdated. Besides I've searched this mailing list for "plugin" word and found pair of plugins that is not mentioned in the list you provided. So probably many other plugins had emerged to this date.

[Seth Tisue]

On Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 9:52:08 AM UTC-4, scala solist wrote:

It is marked outdated. Besides I've searched this mailing list for "plugin" word and found pair of plugins that is not mentioned in the list you provided. So probably many other plugins had emerged to this date.

Indeed. But I'm fairly confident there is no other list. Maybe you'd like to put one together yourself?

You could probably turn up a bunch of plugins by searching GitHub, e.g. for nsc.plugins.

 

[scala solist]

I took search as you had suggested. GitHub is now suited well for such searches. The result is filled with duplicates and extended search options is disabled for wide-area search. I've tried also ohloh searcher (openhub now), but it is even worse than github searcher. So I've decided to browse github search entries and collect all found projects. Some of them provide little or none documentation, so I dived into source code to determine purpose behind the plugins.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CEp3jGnIz21uixUolv6SKol2dgX0SQFYHhimjl7raSA/edit?usp=sharing

I was amused how many plugins were developed independently for same purpose. And they quickly become abandoned just after release. I've found numerous static code analyser plugins and most of them is incompatible with modern scala compiler. Scala community is seemed quite disconnected and disorganized. That was just compiler plugins, a small part among variety of scala projects. I'm interested in what state are other scala projects, but indexing them would consume too much time.

[som-snytt]

scala-js is merely "alive" in the sense that an asteroid could wipe out the rest of the Scala ecosystem and scala-js would survive to populate a new world.

Another consideration is that macros serve in place of quickie plugins. I would be curious to see if the more active plugins can coexist. There's a code comment that Ammonite and Acyclic collide because both want to follow typer, trampled in their urgency to reach the shrine. And if a plugin does real work, it mustn't create trees that other plugins don't anticipate.

[scala solist]

Indeed there are plenty of unsupported plugins that shows clearly how macros functionality was needed in the old times.

And would scala-js do if natural disaster doesn't happen and wipe its older brother? Anyway I'm not insisting on particular classifications. I've searched through a lot of projects and could pay not enough time for each, so my judgement is rather vague. The main purpose was indexing and I hope that this index would be expanded to proper community supported wiki article(s). The well-known wiki page is both incomplete and outdated.