scala3-seed.g8 VS scala-cli

now you might ask : what plugin use to do X ? Where do I find them ? Well, maybe you don't ! Sbt can use g8 ( giter8 ) templates to boostrap projects. The official ones can be a bit bare, but anyone can make their own. Try this one from DevInsideYou for example. He also has a YouTube channel which I would highly recommend. If you look around a bit, you'll find a lot of those setup with libs, boilerplate and sometimes even Github Actions CI/CD pipelines

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.