February 2025 minutes

minutes/_posts/2025-02-05-february-5-2025.md

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+# Minutes of the 34th meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2024
+
+Minutes are [archived](https://scala.epfl.ch/records.html) on the
+Scala Center website.
+
+## Summary
+
+The following agenda was distributed to attendees:
+[agenda](https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/blob/main/agendas/034-2024-q4.md).
+
+Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scala 3 maintenance,
+the Scala 3 language specification, Scala.js maintenance, the Scala
+Improvement Process, sbt 2, the new Scala Highlights newsletter,
+Google of Summer Code, Scala Advent of Code, compiler sprees, Scala
+Days, and fundraising.
+
+Details are below and in the Center's activity report:
+
+* [report](https://scala.epfl.ch/records/2024-Q4-activity-report.html)
+
+One new proposal was received this quarter:
+
+* [SCP-034](https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/blob/main/proposals/034-artifact-publishing.md): Artifact publishing
+
+After discussion, the board decided to postpone any formal vote on it.
+
+Other topics covered included officer elections; officers remained
+unchanged.
+
+## Date, Time and Location
+
+The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at
+16:15 (UTC).
+
+Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).
+
+## Attendees
+
+The company formerly known as Lightbend is now called Akka.  Lukas
+Rytz is still the Akka representative, but he was unavailable for this
+meeting so Seth filled in.
+
+Officers:
+
+* Chris Kipp (chairperson), community
+* Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
+* Sébastien Doeraene (interim technical director), EPFL
+* Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
+* Seth Tisue (secretary), Akka
+
+Board members:
+
+* Zainab Ali, community representative
+* Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab (substituting for Krzysztof Borowski)
+* Dmitrii Naumenko, JetBrains
+* Seth Tisue, Akka (substituting for Lukas Rytz)
+* Eugene Yokota, community representative
+
+Apologies:
+
+* Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
+
+## Technical report
+
+Séb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities
+since the last meeting. His remarks were based on the Center's more
+detailed Q4 quarterly activity report:
+
+* [report](https://scala.epfl.ch/records/2024-Q4-activity-report.html)
+
+And the Center's 2025 Q1 roadmap:
+
+* [roadmap](https://scala.epfl.ch/records/2025-Q1-roadmap.html)
+
+The following notes do not repeat the contents of the report and
+roadmap, but only supplement them.
+
+Séb noted that at its current staffing level the Center is currently
+doing at least as much organizing and community work as technical
+work.
+
+A board member asked where Scala.js's WebAssembly back end stands.
+Séb said that optimizing the back end is still pending. Closures in
+particular are not optimized yet. Martin added that stable exceptions
+support in WebAssembly in browsers is another pending issue preventing
+the Center's work on this from being quite ready yet for use in common
+scenarios.
+
+There was some technical discussion about how the Scala 3 debugger
+would be packaged to be consumed by IntelliJ and other tools. Also,
+an officer asked about the debugger code moving into the main Scala 3
+repo; does that mean that fixes require a new language release? Séb
+said yes, but that code is now stable enough now for it to be worth
+it.
+
+## Scala 2 report
+
+This was presented by Seth.
+
+Scala Newsletter is out today, and covers both Scala 3 and Scala 2.
+Let us know what you think, as this will be the template for future
+issues, which will be published quarterly.
+
+Since the last meeting, we published a blog post about our Scala 2
+maintenance plans. Note that 2.12 is now under minimal maintenance.
+
+Scala 2.13.15 and 2.13.16 came out since the last meeting.  Changes
+were modest and focused on compatibility, on supporting Scala 3
+migration, and on improvements to warnings and linting.  There have
+been no 2.13.16 regression reports, so if anyone was holding back on
+upgrading, I'd say go ahead.
+
+As usual, we've opened threads on the Contributors forum for
+discussing plans for the next releases:
+
+* 2.13.17: https://contributors.scala-lang.org/t/scala-2-13-17-release-planning/6994
+* 2.12.21: https://contributors.scala-lang.org/t/scala-2-12-21-release-planning/6753
+
+We plan for
+[SIP-51](https://docs.scala-lang.org/sips/drop-stdlib-forwards-bin-compat.html)
+(resuming making additions to the standard library) to be a theme
+for 2.13.17.
+
+An officer asked: if the primary motivation for maintaining 2.12 is sbt 1,
+does that mean that when sbt 2 comes out, 2.12 be EOLed?  Seth
+responded: perhaps eventually, but not right away. We are assuming a
+longer timeframe since sbt 1 will remain in wide use for some time yet
+to come, even once sbt 2 is available.
+
+## SCP-034: Artifact publishing
+
+Eugene summarized [the
+proposal](https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/blob/main/proposals/034-artifact-publishing.md).
+
+Séb expressed support; "it seems like a sensible thing to do". One
+board member wondered if maintainers would be sufficiently motivated
+to migrate to a shared implementation. Another member asked if there's
+a particular current implementation that would be the basis of the
+shared one; there was no simple, single answer.
+
+The rest of the discussion centered on whether the Center would have
+enough engineering resources this year to lead this. In the end, the
+board decided not to formally vote on it now, but revisit the proposal
+later. Chris suggested that Eugene amend the proposal to reflect
+today's discussion.
+
+## Elections
+
+For chairperson, Chris Kipp indicated his willingness to continue as
+chair and was elected unanimously. (Chairs are not required to serve
+past one year, but a willing chair is welcome to serve for longer.)
+
+Also re-elected without any other nominations being made were Martin
+Odersky (technical advisor) and Seth Tisue (secretary).
+
+## Community report
+
+This section was led by Zainab and Eugene.
+
+Zainab said the London community is currently strong, with more events
+occurring, with attendance up as well. The London Scala group is now
+doing open-source hack days and women-in-Scala meetings, in addition
+to the usual meetups with speakers. ScalaBridge has received feedback
+that it could devote more time to setup and tooling, as that usually
+causes participants more trouble than the language itself.
+
+Eugene noted that X (aka Twitter) is no longer as universal a source
+of news and discussion; some users remain but others have dispersed to
+Bluesky and/or Mastodon. He said that as a result, the Scala Reddit is
+even more important to the community than before, and the discussions
+and engagement there have been strong recently (including topics about
+education and training).
+
+He also observed that there have been several extremely active
+language design discussions recently, such as the one about collection
+literals.  There was some discussion among the board about how these
+proposals and discussions can best be framed and structured, to
+encourage high quality engagement and ensure that people feel heard.
+
+There was some also some discussion on how to better coordinate
+language changes with tooling maintainers, including the recent
+introduction of the concept of "preview" features as an intermediate
+state between "experimental" and completed.
+
+One board member expressed a wish for Scala people (perhaps even
+Center members) to more present at non-Scala conferences, representing
+Scala outside of our own community.
+
+There was some discussion around how having a smaller engineering
+staff may change community perception of the Center. There was general
+agreement that our publicity should focus on what advances are
+happening and not too much on exactly where they happened (except, of
+course, to give credit where credit is due!). That's part of the idea
+behind the new Scala Highlights newsletter, which is assembled by the
+Center, but isn't restricted to presenting the Center's own
+activities.
+
+## Management and financial report
+
+Darja said that a major piece of news since the last meeting was the
+publication in October of the new Scala governance and "development
+guarantees" documents, as described in [this blog
+post](https://www.scala-lang.org/news/new-governance.html).
+
+Also very important, the publication of the first issue of [Scala
+Highlights](https://www.scala-lang.org/highlights/2025/02/06/highlights-2024.html).
+The first issue covers all of 2024; future issues will have quarterly
+news.
+
+The Center's finances have improved thanks to one-time donations and
+assistance from several sources. Regardless, hiring additional staff
+would require additional funding. Fundraising efforts are ongoing.
+
+The Center is also still in the process of reviving Scala Days for
+later in 2025. (Later, after the meeting, plans were finalized and
+[August 2025 dates were announced](https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2025/02/18/announcing-scala-days-2025.html).)
+
+## Conclusion
+
+The next meeting will be held online, probably in April. If possible,
+a late-summer or fall meeting will be held in-person at EPFL.

records.md

@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ in the [Projects page]({% link projects.md %}).
 
 ### Board meeting minutes
 
+- [February 5, 2025 - Thirty-Fourth SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2025/02/05/february-5-2025.html)
 - [April 25, 2024 - Thirty-Second SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2024/04/25/april-25-2024.html)
 - [February 7, 2024 - Thirty-First SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2024/02/07/february-7-2024.html)
 - [October 17, 2023 - Thirtieth SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2023/10/17/october-17-2023.html)