Community

Popular ways to connect with the Scala community include forums, chat rooms, local user groups, and conferences.

The community is also the source of many libraries, tools, and other resources around Scala.

Who’s behind Scala?

Scala was created by Prof. Martin Odersky at EPFL.

The Scala language and associated websites are cooperative projects of the Scala Center at EPFL, the Scala 3 team in Martin’s research group (also at EPFL), the Scala teams at Lightbend and VirtusLab, and the Scala community more broadly, with participation from many companies, organizations, and individuals.

Scala 2 maintenance is primarily handled by the Lightbend team. They also participate in Scala 3 development.

VirtusLab focuses on infrastructure and tooling for Scala 3.

The Scala Center focuses on education (especially online courses), documentation, open source community outreach, and tooling. Community participation in all of these efforts is strongly encouraged.

Forums

The Scala Center operates the following Discourse forums:

• users.scala-lang.org: The main forum for questions, discussions, and announcements about programming in Scala. Beginner questions are very welcome. Any question can and should receive a courteous and insightful answer. (Replaces the old scala-user and scala-announce groups.)

• contributors.scala-lang.org: For anything related to moving Scala forward; from Scala Platform library discussions, to Scala Improvement Process discussions, to development work on the Scala compiler, standard library, and modules. Core maintainers and open-source contributors are both welcome, as well as those who want to see what’s coming down the pipe and would like to be involved. (Replaces the old scala-internals, scala-language, scala-debate, scala-sips, and scala-tools groups.)

• teachers.scala-lang: Discussions related to the usage of Scala to teach programming: material, tooling, guidelines.

Discourse is an open-source forum and mailing list platform. You can participate via the web, or you can use “mailing list mode”, where you receive posts in your inbox and can reply to them via email. The web interface provides statistics, upvoting, polls, and other features. Posts can be written in Markdown, including syntax highlighting.

These forums are covered by the Scala Code of Conduct.

Lightbend operates a Discourse forum as well:

• discuss.lightbend.com: For discussion of reactive architectures, Akka, Play, and related tooling including sbt.

Scala Jobs

Employers and job seekers can find each other in the #jobs channel of the Scala Discord.

Job postings are not allowed in our other forums and chat rooms.

Chat Rooms

Our main chat platform is Discord, and the main Scala server is:

• Scala
  • the #scala-users channel is especially beginner-friendly
  • the #scala-contributors channel is about moving Scala forward
  • the #jobs channel is the only place we allow job postings
  • ask on #admin if you have questions or suggestions about the server itself
  • there are many other channels, including #spark, #scala-js, and #scala-native

The server is covered by the Scala Code of Conduct.

Alternate clients such as Element are supported via a Matrix bridge. Connect to #scala-lang:matrix.org to access the main Discord channel, or explore #scala-space:matrix.org to see channels from all over the Scala community (many are bridged in from other places like Discord, Gitter, or IRC).

Scala-oriented Discord servers operated by the community include:

• IntelliJ: the IntelliJ IDEA development environment
• Scalameta: Scalameta-based tooling: Metals, Scalameta, Scalafix, Scalafmt, and Mdoc
• Play Framework: the Play web framework for Scala and Java
• Typelevel: the Typelevel ecosystem for pure-functional programming in Scala

English-language Scala rooms on other chat platforms besides Discord include:

• scala_en (Telegram)
• scala/scala (Gitter)
• #scala (IRC)

International chat rooms are available as well:

• scala/cn (Gitter)
• Scala Fr (Discord)
• scala/it (Discord)
• Scala Jp (Discord)
• scala_ru (Telegram)
• Scala Ukraine (Telegram)

Note also that Stack Overflow offers languages other than English, for example the scala tag on es.stackoverflow.com.

Reporting issues

If you’re having a problem with Scala, your first line of defense is our forums and chat rooms. The unexpected behavior you’re seeing might not be a bug. Especially if you’re new to the language, it’s best to discuss the matter with more experienced users before filing a bug report.

That said, bugs do occur and bug reports are valuable. You can report bugs here:

Scala 2 compiler, standard library, and language spec:

• scala/bug

Scala 3 compiler and standard library additions:

• lampepfl/dotty

Don’t forget to search past issues first to see if the issue has already been reported.

User Groups

Most local Scala user groups are listed on Meetup.

Conferences

See our events page.

ScalaBridge

Volunteers organizing free introductory Scala programming workshops for underrepresented groups, to improve diversity in the Scala community.

• ScalaBridge site
• How to organize: advice and help on how to bring ScalaBridge to your city

Stack Overflow

Scala is an active topic on Stack Overflow, a very popular programmer Q&A site.

Reddit

There is a large and active Scala community on the /r/Scala subreddit.

Sources of Scala News

Official:

• Blog/News Page on this site
• @scala_lang on Mastodon
• @scala_lang on Twitter

Community:

• Scala Times weekly Scala newspaper
• This Week in Scala weekly Scala newspaper
• Scala News source for Scala news and blog feeds
  • blog directory
• Tooling Talks A series of talks about Scala and tooling.
• The Scala Logs Podcast with interviews with developers, open source contributors, subject matter experts, and the like

Many Scala users are active on Twitter for sharing Scala-related news items and opinions. Ask your Scala friends who they follow on Twitter (besides @scala_lang!).

Community-Powered Learning Resources

• Scala Exercises
• Scala School
• Scala Puzzlers
• Scala Cookbook
• Interactive Tour
• Functional programming course/exercises
• Scala Online Courses
• Best Scala Tutorials On YouTube

Community Libraries and Tools

Finding libraries:

• Scaladex, maintained by the Scala Center, is “an index of the known Scala ecosystem”
• Awesome Scala is “a community driven list of useful Scala libraries, frameworks and software”
• Typelevel.org provides an assortment of popular libraries and extensions to Scala.
• Trending Scala repositories on GitHub

Staying current:

• Scala Times includes library releases
• #ThisWeekInScala includes library releases

Non-JVM platforms

• Scala.js compiles Scala code to JavaScript
• Scala Native compiles Scala code to LLVM for native execution
• Scala on Android community site

The Scala Center

• The Scala Center is an open source foundation that brings together a coalition of individuals and organizations working together to contribute to Scala.
  • Scala Center FAQ

Scala open source

Want to start making open-source contributions to projects in the Scala ecosystem?

Scaladex lists projects welcoming contributions.

Also, on GitHub, a common convention is to use the label “good first issue” on issues that are especially easy on-ramps to getting started in a particular repo:

• “good first issue” tickets: GitHub link

And, some repos also use a “help wanted” label if the maintainers especially desire contributor attention:

• “help wanted” tickets: GitHub link

Phil Bagwell Memorial Scala Community Award

The Phil Bagwell Memorial Scala Community Award is given to individuals who have made significant efforts to grow the Scala Community.

Archives

Read-only archives of these retired groups remain available.

• scala-user, scala-announce, scala-language, scala-debate, scala-internals, scala-sips