Release Candidate for Scala 2.9.0 arrives

The Scala developers have announced the first release candidate of Scala 2.9.0. The new version of the Java Virtual Machine based programming language introduces a new "par" method which creates copies of collections which can be processed in parallel by multiple cores of a CPU in operations such as 'foreach', 'map' and 'filter'. This should allow much better utilisation of today's 2, 4, 6 and 8 core CPUs. The language now offers parallel versions of arrays, ranges, hash maps, hash sets, hash tries and vectors. Parallel collections can be converted back to traditional sequential collections by using the 'seq' method.

Other enhancements include a generalised version of try-catch-finally, new collections methods (collectFirst, maxBy, minBy, span, inits, tails, permutations, combinations and subsets), a new trait called App (an alternative to the Application trait) and new scala.sys and scala.sys.process (imported from the Process library of the Simple-Build-Tool). REPL, the interactive command line environment for Scala, now starts up faster and offers improved jline support, multi-line history and new commands (:implicits, :keybindings, :javap). The new version also offers bugfixes and performance improvements.

The release candidate has been made available for testing purposes and, as with all pre-release software, is not intended for production use. The 2.9.0 release candidate can be downloaded as a generic installer, for Unix and Mac OS X or Windows. Documentation and source code are also available and the Scala 2.9.0 API documentation is also online. Scala available under a 3 clause BSD licence. The latest stable release of Scala was 2.8.1, released last November.

See also:

• EU funds open source language Scala, a report from The H.
• Scala programming language roadmap, a report from The H.
  

(djwm)