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The Sovereign Tech Fund Invests in Scala

https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2026/01/27/sta-invests-in-scala.html
38•bishabosha•4h ago

Comments

betaby•1h ago
Why would the governments invest money on such a niche language? "Scala is widely used to build and operate essential systems across multiple industries." - very bold statement.
nish__•1h ago
I made another comment about it. But the answer is Scala is the number one language for building hardware these days via Chisel.
betaby•1h ago
https://www.chisel-lang.org/community

second link - 404

third link - achieved project on github

fourth link - educational project

Perhaps it's a very know and useful project, yet indeed seems very niche to me.

ldayley•1h ago
As a European project the foundation is likely pursuing funding from EU sources using the fact that it isn’t US tech as a selling point.
beastman82•1h ago
Probably because it's an amazing language for people who know what they're doing
ForHackernews•58m ago
Is it niche? Scala is arguably the single most successful functional language. It interoperates with the whole JVM ecosystem. It's probably the #3 JVM language after Java and Kotlin.

Spark is Scala, Twitter was (is?) Scala https://sysgears.com/articles/how-and-why-twitter-uses-scala...

ActorNightly•56m ago
Anything that runs on JVM should not be invested in.
epolanski•19m ago
Scala was niche (but of course, you need to define niche first) and its market share has shrunk further in the last decade.
forgotpwd16•57m ago
Scala may have fallen out of favor but was quite popular few years ago. And perhaps still is the most popular EU-designed language (developed by EPFL).
oytis•25m ago
Python. Python is the most popular language designed in EU. EPFL is not even in EU
epolanski•20m ago
Others worth mentioning are Kotlin, Ada, Pascal, Haskell, Zig, Erlang, Elixir, Prolog, Ocaml.
forgotpwd16•11m ago
True to both. My brain not braining. Was thinking Europe-based/driven. Python started in CWI but PSF is USA-based.
oytis•27m ago
Maybe they've applied for the grant 10 years ago when Scala was all rage
nish__•1h ago
I learned recently that one of the killer apps for Scala seems to be in hardware design. Chisel [0] is the core technology of the best open source RISC-V chips. Chipyard [1] is designing leading edge type OOE and AI chips and all of the code is written in Scala. Personally, I can't wait for some of these designs to start being mass produced and put in laptops and phones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard

abeppu•1h ago
So, as a justification for support of scala, the thing that seems lacking to me is that Chisel seems to still be centered around scala 2? E.g. their recommended template for getting started still uses scala 2 ... so without support to motivate them to use scala 3, it's not obvious that Chisel benefits much from current work on the scala language? I have not fully understood the Chisel project but I see they have a "compiler plugin" which suggests to me that moving fully off scala 2 requires a meaningful redesign.

https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel-template/blob/main/b...

appplication•53m ago
I’m not super plugged into scala but I work with Spark quite a bit and my observation has been the whole scala 2.13 -> 3 transition is a huge mess for just about everyone who touches it. I don’t have enough hands-on context to understand why it’s so painful but it seems to be similar or worse to the python 2.7 -> 3 transition in terms of sticking friction.
abeppu•27m ago
It is a mess. I've spent some time trying to convert some academic oss projects and some removed features really force large redesigns. I think rather than funding the stuff on this announcement, I wish they would fund a team of experts to work on migration of a prioritized list of projects. This would both provide example patterns of migrating substantial projects and unblock projects who have been saying "we would like to try migrating but library X we use still hasn't"
nightpool•48m ago
Well, a more optimistic take here is that if future development on the Scala language was funded explicitly by/for people who are current using Scala 2, that means that the developers would more clearly understand their requirements in terms of making an easier transition for users moving from Scala 2 -> 3
throwup238•12m ago
Chisel absolutely isn’t really the type of software that benefits from upgrading because it’s largely standalone. They could be the last project still stuck on 2.x a decade from now and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to its users.

I’ve only used Chisel for a few projects but I’ve never used anything but Chisel in those codebases. Simulation, verification, and all the painful stuff in FPGA/ASIC development depends on non-Scala tooling and all of the inputs (parametrization) are just read in from JSON files produced by scripts in other languages.

It would be nice to be up to date but the hardware NRE is so damn high that working around any limitations in Scala support is a rounding error. Chisel’s outputs are sent out for $X00,000 fab production runs so no one gives a damn whether it’s Scala 2 or 3 as long as it ships a working IC.

ATMLOTTOBEER•39m ago
Happy to see investment in sbt and the stdlib

Sad to see code coverage tooling called out as something they’re spending money on

Happy to see scala get sponsorship

thefaux•28m ago
The lead maintainer of sbt does it as a labor of love. I am very curious if he actually will be receiving any money.
oytis•28m ago
That's the problem with state investments in software. One can rightfully complain about misallocation of capital by private investors, but state investments are a whole new level.
epolanski•24m ago
The Albanian government invested 10M in Mira Murati's startup.

All on the basis of her...being Albanian.

Talk about public money mismanagement.

ecshafer•19m ago
Scala isn't as hot as it used to be. I think the rough Scala 2->3 transition, coupled with improvements in the base Java language, emergence of Kotlin + Android support, and popularity of Python in data science and data pipelines (lets just do everything in one language became popular) kind of made Scala not quite as popular as it could have been. Plus the long compile times are a pain. However it seems to have a really high coolness ratio for a language. The few jobs I do see in Scala are very cool looking. Very few boring looking jobs.
sh3rl0ck•14m ago
What would you categorise as a "cool looking job"?

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The Sovereign Tech Fund Invests in Scala

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