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The Scala homepage says that Scala 1.4 was runnable on the .NET framework - what is the status of Scala on the CLR now? Is anyone working on it? I think it would make a great GUI tool combined with GTK# and Mono...

Michał Bendowski
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  • It's possible to use the latest Scala (atm v2.8) with .NET: http://tountas-software.blogspot.com/2010/07/scala-on-net-via-ikvm.html – Nikolaos Jul 26 '10 at 17:02
  • "I think it would make a great GUI tool". Wouldn't F# make an even better tool, since it was built specifically to run on .NET? – J D Feb 26 '11 at 22:14
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    As of December 8, 2012 it looks like Scala.NET is going to be [officially closed](https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-6772) as a first class citizen of main scala project and maybe discontinued. – om-nom-nom Dec 08 '12 at 03:23

6 Answers6

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Presently, it is not working. However, there is some funding (I heard Microsoft, but I have no confirmation) to get it working on the CLR, so there's an on-going effort, which seems to be aiming at basic functionality available by the time Scala 2.8 is out.

By "basic" I mean it should run and produce code, but there's not going to be much CLR-specific tests, and it shouldn't take any advantage of CLR-specific features or libraries.

At any rate, at the moment, it is not abandoned.

EDIT: Here is a specific reference to the fact it's not abandoned. This is a snippet from one of the regular progress reports the Scala team sends to the Scala Internals mailing list. I picked this one simply because it's the most recent one mentioning it (12 days ago at the time I'm writing this), but anyone looking at them will see this has been referred to regularly on the reports of the first semester of 2010.

Scala Meeting 2010-05-04

People attending the meeting: Ingo, Miguel, Donna, Adriaan, Iulian, Phil, Lukas, Philipp, Toni, Gilles, Martin, Hubert, Tiark.

  • Current work
    • cleanups in remote actors and concurrent.opts, documentation for actors
    • fixes with named arguments
    • general bug fixing
    • work on scaladoc
    • work on .NET
Daniel C. Sobral
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  • If it is not abandoned, is there any information about the project on the Internet? – Michał Bendowski Dec 14 '09 at 15:48
  • Sure. It has been mentioned on the list scala-internals, archives for which can be found on Nabble. – Daniel C. Sobral Dec 14 '09 at 21:49
  • Do you cite any specific references? Everything I can find suggests that Scala.NET has been abandoned and only ever supported .NET 1.1 (which is 7 years out of date!) anyway. – J D May 16 '10 at 23:16
  • @Jon Sure, I'll add a reference to the answer. – Daniel C. Sobral May 17 '10 at 14:54
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    At the ScalaDays keynote last month, Martin said, "One thing we are working on is a reimplementation of Scala on .NET. We have started again to work on a native Scala compiler on .NET and a Visual Studio plugin. That work is actually funded by Microsoft and I hope we have something to show you this year for that." http://days2010.scala-lang.org/node/138/137 – Matt R May 17 '10 at 15:58
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The status of Scala on the CLR is... shabby. Unless they've worked heavily on it since 2.7.3 (and there's no evidence of this in the changelogs, though I haven't actually tested it), it:

  • only runs against .NET 1.1 (!)
  • outputs IL assembler which you then have to ilasm by hand (!)
  • is missing several language and library features (like structural types and parser combinators)

It's being maintained to the extent that they're continuing to merge revisions from the Java compiler into the MSIL compiler, but other than that I'd say it's moribund.

itowlson
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In an interview on scala-lang.org on 18th July 2011:

Can I run Scala programs on .Net now?
Miguel:
The simple answer is yes, with a few limitations that will be remove by the fall.

Link: The inteview
Link: Binaries

Brownie
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Martin Odersky says in this SE Radio interview (January 2011):

I don't want to give you an estimated time of arrival but it should be certainly this year including visual studio support.

He starts talking about .NET at the 15 minute mark.

Brownie
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Given that Scala on the JVM is at version 2.7 (and 2.8 is imminent), I don't believe this is being maintained.

See also this StackOverflow question (from April 2009), which has more details.

Community
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Brian Agnew
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It's also probably worth noting that the advent of F# has limited Microsoft's interest in Scala, in that they now have a "blessed" functional language of their own. NIH.

Brendan W. McAdams
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  • An understatement now: F# is a supported Microsoft product and a first-class language on .NET next to C# and VB. – J D May 16 '10 at 20:34