scala-cli VS pekko

That has not much to do with the JVM. See Scala CLI[1] for instance, the developer experience is pretty similar to Cargo.

The thing is, with any non-trivial project, zero to hello world isn't a very useful metric. Gradle (and Maven, sbt, ...) do a lot more than Cargo, and their usage is primarily optimized for complex multi-modules projects.

[1] https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org

Scala CLI v1.0.5 was released. https://github.com/VirtusLab/scala-cli/releases/tag/v1.0.5 This includes:

The new official Scala build tool / compiler front end (scala-cli) is amazing,

https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/

The thing that really struck me after years of python is how it lets you out dependencies directly in a comment on top of a script and it will download and run with them automatically, without poisoning any system settings. It's so simple!

sbt can indeed be a bit harsh for beginners. If your aim is not to build a big project, you might want to use scala-cli instead : no complex build script, only command line goodness to run, test, compile and package your code. Yes it supports dockerization. No need for a dockerfile.

Imo the tooling has to become way more user friendly. The Scala community has picked up on this and made Scala-CLI the official running tool for Scala. It's a great tool for single module projects and makes everything from adding dependencies to building fat jars very easy, also the runner comes as a native image. The reason I'm mentioning is because sometimes we forget how hard it can be as a beginner, especially when younger people are used to simpler CLIs from newer languages.

We even have a ticket for something similar right here. Feel free to upvote and/or comment on it.

Links: - https://dotty.epfl.ch/ - https://scala-native.org/en/stable/ - https://www.scala-js.org/ - https://typelevel.org/ - https://zio.dev/ - https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/pull/3120 - https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/pull/16517 - https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/index.html - https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/ - https://scalameta.org/metals/ - https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/guides/migration/compatibility-intro.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2023/04/18/faster-scalajs-development-with-frontend-tooling.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/08/17/long-term-compatibility-plans.html

Code gens are not that far away: https://github.com/VirtusLab/scala-cli/issues/610

Check out Scala CLI as it will very soon be the one true and sanctioned way to get started.

Pekko is open source, has the same API. So there's no problem there.

Understandable considering the size of Pekko and how much time is passed, I would recommend asking any questions/concerns on either the Pekko mailing list https://lists.apache.org/[email protected] or on Github discussions https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/discussions.

Another big reason behind the "struggle" is we have done further improvements. For example the first release of Pekko will support all Scala versions from 2.12 up to 3.3.0 LTS (which was just released a couple of days ago). This also includes Pekko's modules which means we had to either add back in Scala 2.12 support or Scala 3 support. Yet another example would be https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/pull/281 which allowed us to drop scala-java8-compat dependency for Scala 2.13 or higher. So while these improvements aren't technically necessary, they have a large impact on Pekko going forward, i.e. the scala-java8-compat change means that we can drop Scala 2.12 at any point in time without breaking users.

Apache Pekko is the open source fork of Akka. I know they can use more hands right now - https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/issues

There is an option missing: Considering switching to pekko when it's ready: https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko

- In 2022, Lightbend changed the Akka licence, made it proprietary and very expensive at large scale

Software that starts out as more "pure", non-corporate open-source can still turn the tables on you and charge large licensing fees later. But at least if it's open source from the start, it can be forked, e.g. for Akka, there's this Apache fork that was started after Akka changed its licence: https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko . This is the key open source protection, and it's true for both corporate and non-corporate projects.