Although I agree they have a good attitude towards deprecation and backwards compatibility, I do not believe their progressive attitude works necessarily implies a lax attitute to backwards compatibility.
Investigation is underway for more sweeping changes where backwards compatibility can be broken on the fundamental level. This is the Dotty project [1], which will influence development of Scala 3.
[1]: https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty
In Scala: Next Stepsscala
scala3
Scala2014–2026
scala / scala3
scala3
The Scala 3 compiler, also known as Dotty.
48Distinct people
76Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Scala 3 compiler, also known as Dotty.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- scala/scala · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 8:27:21 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year76 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-02-19 09:03:06 UTC to 2026-09-03 14:19:53 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 6 | 10 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 6 | 9 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Scala 3
This is the home of the Scala 3 standard library, compiler, and language spec.
More documentation here.
Building a Local Distribution
sbt dist/Universal/packageBin
Find the newly-built distributions in dist/target/
Code of Conduct
Scala 3 uses the Scala Code of Conduct
for all communication and discussion. This includes both GitHub, Discord and
other more direct lines of communication such as email.
How to Contribute
Contributing guide
Issues where help is wanted
Policy regarding the use of LLM-based tools
License
Scala 3 is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
6 sourcesScala 3 will be a bigger undertaking, likely to have a major amount of breaking of core language contructs and other fundamental changes. Experimentation is already underway: it's called the Dotty compiler [1].
[1]: https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty
In Scala 2.12 RoadmapDotty is another option, a potential successor to Scala: https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty
In Types Are The TruthIt says a lot about the scale of adoption the big language players have that despite the aforementioned inroads into the enterprise that Scala has made, it is still very much a niche language; Haskell at this point in time, even more so.
Am curious to see how Scala 3/Dotty backed Scala works out. Enabling better tooling and faster build times via a generally less kitchen sink-y/more regular language should bring Scala adoption to new levels. Dotty is under active development, even saw a Github issue talking about the migration tool[1]. It's going to happen, just a matter of when.
[1] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues/129
In A Year of Functional ProgrammingHow on earth does Scala garner nearly 50% developer interest in the survey??
That's quite a surprise given the bashing Scala has taken of late (AKA the Paul Phillips Scala "tribute" tour), and the general thumbs down that Scala receives on HN, Reddit, etc.
Kotlin should pick up some steam once a stable release comes around, they've done a good job cherry picking the best of Scala while avoiding the kitchen sink baggage that Scala hopes to shed somewhere down the road (with Scala 3 backed by Dotty[1]).
Not sure about Clojure, certainly has a following, but is probably not going to appeal to the enterprise crowd, whereas Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, etc. type safe and familiar-ish syntax languages will.
Java 8 (and 9 to come) is the elephant in the room, hopefully won't crush alternate JVM language adoption, diversity's a good thing.
[1] https://
Read the rest
Dotty – a platform to try out new concepts and compiler technologies for Scala
1 points · Open discussion