What is Scala written in?
What Scala is used for
Scala blends object-oriented and functional programming on the JVM and is popular for large-scale data processing and back-end systems where type safety and concurrency matter.
Notable software: Apache Spark, Apache Kafka tooling, and the back-ends of Twitter and many data platforms.
Quick Facts
- Designed by
- Martin Odersky
- Developer
- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
- First released
- 2003
- Typing
- static
- License
- BSD licenses and Apache Software License 2.0
- Filename extension
- .scala, .sc
- Website
- scala-lang.org
About Scala
Scala is a general-purpose programming language. It is a statically typed and garbage-collected language that compiles to bytecode that runs on a virtual machine. It supports object-oriented and functional programming. Compiling to bytecode for a virtual machine is the same model the JVM and .NET use: the VM, not the CPU, interprets or JIT-compiles the bytecode.
Scala first appeared in 2003 and was designed by Martin Odersky at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Scala has a large, active user base today.
How Scala is implemented
In the Language Lineage dataset, Scala is self-hosting, so its own compiler is written in Scala itself. Reaching self-hosting, where a language is mature enough to compile itself, is a milestone that proves the language can handle a large, real-world program.
Scala in the language family tree
Scala drew on ideas from Smalltalk, Java, Haskell, and Lisp and went on to influence Kotlin.
Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata · Official site
Frequently Asked Questions
Evidence Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language)
- https://scala-lang.org/blog/2016/11/11/dotty-compiler-bootstraps.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_(programming_language)
- Scala on Wikidata (Q460584)