I've said it before and am repeating myself here: I believe including
Scala code is a very bad decision for the following reasons:
- Not a lot of people are proficient in Scala
- What happens when the people who wrote the Scala code leave ? We'd
have to build up Scala knowledge in house to be able to develop/maintain
that code
- Support: same for knowledge: we have to support Scala code if there's
a bug, but IMO we don't have Scala folks in support
- Debugging: cross language debugging is hairy at least (or so I
heard/read from different people)
- I've had a few run-ins with the Scala compiler when compiling
Infinispan with Maven
If it was up to me, I'd flat-out *prohibit* any new Scala code in
Infinispan. Long-term I'd also replace Scala with Java, although the
server is probably not such a big problem as it is a standalone and
independent subsystem.
my 5 cents,
On 1/31/13 12:45 PM, Mircea Markus wrote:
Hi,
The REST module is written in Scala (both main + tests). We have some
*test* contributions written in Java (thanks mlinhard).
There was an IRC discussion on whether it's worth migrating the Java
contribution to Scala code or not.
Pros for migrating the contribution from Java to Scala:
- the REST module is written in Scala. Contributing these tests in
Java would make the module bi-lingual, potentially confusing future
contributors
- even though this is not the case with this particular contribution,
there might be code duplications between the scala test suite and java
test suite.
Cons for migrating the contribution from Java to Scala:
- there are contributors that are not familiar with Scala or are more
proficient with Java(such as mlinhard). Forcing them to contribute in
a language they are not familiar with would put them off
- my general feeling over time was that people (including me) are not
very enthusiastic about debugging and extending Scala code. So IMO if
there's a choice between scala and java (in the scope of the scala
modules) we should stick to Java wherever possible (such as this
contribution).
This email is not about the migration of scala code to java, but about
the very specific contribution described above (even thought the mix
of scala+java code in ISPN is a a very interesting topic by itself).
--
Bela Ban, JGroups lead (
http://www.jgroups.org)