Tuesday 27 January 2026 Darja Jovanovic, Scala Center We’re truly excited to share that Scala has received an investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund to strengthen Scala’s long-term security,…
Darja Jovanovic, Scala Center
We’re truly excited to share that Scala has received an investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund to strengthen Scala’s long-term security, maintenance, and developer experience.
The work is coordinated by the Scala Center and runs for two years, with a total investment of €377,300.
The Sovereign Tech Fund is a program of the Sovereign Tech Agency that globally invests in open software components that build our core digital infrastructure.
The Sovereign Tech Agency and the Sovereign Tech Fund
The Sovereign Tech Agency is the first publicly funded organization in Europe that supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructures. It is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation and is a subsidiary of SPRIND, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation.
The Sovereign Tech Agency’s mission is to strengthen the open source ecosystem sustainably, focusing on resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code as foundations for a future-ready economy and modern society.
The Sovereign Tech Fund identifies and invests in open source software components that enable the creation of software, and supports key technologies with broad societal importance. Since October 2022, the Sovereign Tech Fund has invested a total of around €34 million in 95 critical technology projects.
Scala is critical digital infrastructure
Scala is widely used to build and operate essential systems across multiple industries. These systems include data pipelines and distributed applications, and some are in highly regulated environments like finance and public services. In these contexts, reliability is paramount. The safety, sustainability, and evolution of the Scala language and its tooling directly impact systems that people and institutions rely on every day.
This is why, in 2016, the Scala Center was founded with a clear mission: to make the Scala open-source ecosystem stronger, more resilient, and sustainable over the long term. Thanks to the continued support of Scala Center industry partners (through the Advisory Board program), EPFL, and the worldwide Scala contributor community, the ecosystem continues to grow stronger every day.
And today, with the Sovereign Tech Fund’s investment in Scala, this commitment is reinforced at a public-infrastructure level. We are very thankful that the Fund’s support recognizes Scala as critical digital infrastructure and enables sustained, focused work on the language’s core foundations over the coming years.
A closer look: what this investment will deliver
1) Security Audit
A dedicated security audit by Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) will uncover vulnerabilities and strengthen confidence in Scala’s core components. This supports not only Scala users, but also the broader environments where Scala runs, for example as a component of complex software supply chains. We are super thankful to the OSTIF team and support!
2) Improvement of scoverage
scoverage is a key tool in the Scala ecosystem for measuring code coverage. Improving it increases the reliability of Scala codebases and helps teams detect gaps in testing earlier, especially as systems evolve.
3) Maintenance of the Standard Library / Core Library Modules and APIs
Long-term maintenance of core libraries and APIs is critical for stability. This includes keeping foundational modules healthy, reducing technical debt, and ensuring compatibility across versions.
4) Modernization and extension of the Standard Library / Core Library Modules and API Documentation
As Scala continues to evolve, modernizing and extending core modules ensures the language remains productive and relevant, while also supporting gradual adoption and stable upgrade paths. The work also brings improvements to API documentation and Scala websites, to improve understanding.
Build tools are the backbone of developer productivity. The major update to sbt 2.0 will make Scala projects easier to build, maintain, and understand. This will be impactful for new users and contributors, as well as for established projects. Among other improvements, sbt 2 adopts Scala 3 (in place of 2.12) as the language for build definitions.
The Scala Center’s role
The Scala Center has been entrusted with coordinating the commissioned work, check out the team working on the projects.
We are very thankful that this support recognizes Scala’s importance in the broader digital landscape, and for investing in foundational work that strengthens the reliability of the systems and services built on Scala across the public sector and industries.
We’ll share updates as work progresses, including milestones, delivered improvements, and opportunities to engage with the effort.
Scala is critical digital infrastructure, so keeping it healthy is a shared responsibility. If you’re using Scala in production, maintaining libraries, or contributing to tooling and documentation, your feedback and involvement help keep Scala strong.
In addition to occasional blog posts such as this one, we’ll also post more detailed updates, progress reports, and calls for feedback on our Discourse-based contributors forum at contributors.scala-lang.org. Please follow the relevant threads to stay informed.
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Comments
Scala isn't as hot as it used to be. I think the rough Scala 2->3 transition, coupled with improvements in the base Java language, emergence of Kotlin + Android support, and popularity of Python in data science and data pipelines (lets just do everything in one language became popular) kind of made Scala not quite as popular as it could have been. Plus the long compile times are a pain. However it seems to have a really high coolness ratio for a language. The few jobs I do see in Scala are very cool looking. Very few boring looking jobs.
Scala is too complicated. Most scala code bases I have worked on have no enforced structure, the language allows for all sorts of unconventional programming paradigms
Yeah I love it when people start defining their own operators all over the place and give them all inscrutable names. "Dude just use the eggplant parm operator: <<=-=>>"
By nikitaga 2026-01-2923:52 ^ This meme is from 10+ years ago when Scala was at the peak of its hype driven by the FP craze. Nobody seriously writes cryptic-symbolic-operator code like that nowadays. Scalaz, the FP library most notorious for cryptic operator/method names, hasn't been relevant for many years. Today everyone uses Cats, ZIO, or plain Tapir or Play, all of which are quite ergonomic.
This is the type of thing that a good PR review culture will handle. I love that this is an option in some languages. But in a company, you need to decide what cool features should be used and when and how much.
By fjordofnorway 2026-01-2922:391 reply Good PR review isn't really enough unless the organization is only large enough to handle around one PR at a time.
With languages like Scala I think its a clearer necessity that someone or some small group in an organization maintains a dominance of expertise or you have different groups that are only using the same language in name or facing overhead to keep in agreement where a lot of the best developers might be basically doing ambassador work.
By mikert89 2026-01-300:01 yeah a small group of experts can leverage scala, its not a language for a corporate environment
By shawn_w 2026-01-300:44 One reason why I keep bouncing off of Haskell.
By packetlost 2026-01-2918:371 reply That's sorta the curse of Lisps too.
Yeah sorta
I would say Clojure is a big exception to that - Clojure applications tend to be more uniform than even non lisps
By packetlost 2026-01-3016:02 Clojure is an exception to pretty much everything in the category. I really wish I had the opportunity to use it in my professional career.
This is exactly what turned me off. It supports so many paradigms that every line of code I wrote I had to sit and think if I was doing it the "right" way and it was miserable.
By eweise 2026-01-2919:10 Part of that I think is the culture and not the language. Personally I try to use the least powerful method that gets the job done and that usually keeps me unblocked. In practice that usually means using it as a better Java and not going down the functional monad path. I know scala has gone through a rough patch and maybe migrating from 2 to 3 is painful. But if you try starting a new project now with the latest Scala 3, I think you'll find that its pretty nice. Even IDE support is pretty good.
By another_twist 2026-01-309:21 I think its because we dont have too many established paradigms for functional programming. Having said that I think Scala is just marvellous. I had to work with a Scala codebase written by a set of very mature devs and it was an absolute joy. It influenced how I write Java.
By yearolinuxdsktp 2026-01-2919:561 reply Scala’s downfall is the culture of writing libraries with the most esoteric syntax imaginable. It’s the opposite of Ruby’s “program with pleasure”—-it is “program with maximum cleverness” and “if it doesn’t look like an obscure math equation or symbol soup, it’s probably not idiomatic Scala.” Java’s designers were opposed to operator overloading due to potential for abuse, and did Scala deliver living proof/nightmare scenario of that.
Now I still want operator overloading, because I favor enabling instead of disabling approaches, and I want, for example, new numeric types to have natural syntax that blends in with built-ins, or an equality operator that works consistently. I’ll even settle for += append to strings and collections.
But even Scala standard libraries take operator use to wild extremes. Apparently it’s not enough to use + to append collections, you must use ++. Except Vec you can add with +. There’s ++= and ++=:, and /: and :: and ::: and ?^ and ?^.
Spark Scala interface introduces =!= for inequality comparison. There’s |@| from Cons library. Don’t get me started on Akka. SBT introduces <++=
Surprisingly you can’t override ==, so Spark implements ===. And specs2 testing library implements ====.
By hocuspocus 2026-01-2920:581 reply I've onboarded experienced and inexperienced developers to fairly big Scala codebases for the best part of a decade and I can't think of a single time symbolic operators were brought up as a source of complexity of confusion. Sbt deprecated <++= 10 years ago.
By bearforcenine 2026-01-2921:42 Agreed. There was a period of time roughly 10-15 years ago where symbolic operators in Scala were very en vogue. That fell out of style in a big way and I haven't encountered symbol soup in a very long time.
Most of the conversations I have with folks about Scala issues these days center around implicits, tooling, and its decline/lack of popularity.
By Scubabear68 2026-01-2917:222 reply You got it. Scala had a shot being an early mover in the JVM functional programming space, but they really shot themselves in the foot with their version transition problems and tooling issues you allude to. Java is probably "good enough" for most shops now, and if you are not bound to the JVM I really don't understand why you would go with Scala today.
By hocuspocus 2026-01-2917:552 reply Scala's decline started before Scala 3, which brought its share of breakage (sometimes for dubious reasons, like the new syntax) but also fixed many warts. Tooling has improved a lot lately, but it's too late.
> if you are not bound to the JVM I really don't understand why you would go with Scala today.
Scala's metaprogramming abilities coupled to a powerful type system are still unmatched. Among mainstream languages, only TypeScript gets somewhat close. For your typical service oriented architecture, libraries such as Tapir or ZIO HTTP are pretty nice. I haven't found anything as pleasant in other languages.
That said if an LLM can write 95% of your code today, this point is a bit moot, sadly.
By ndriscoll 2026-01-2919:35 It's not really moot though. The primary benefit of concise but robust frameworks like ZIO is that they are easy to read (like the program is mostly business logic with minimal syntax noise/programming language bookkeeping), not that they're easy to write (though that's true too). Metaprogramming also works nicely with LLMs because you get the expressiveness of something like Python (or better) while retaining a strong type checking layer to give a feedback loop to the LLM. In fact, it kind of shines with an LLM because you largely don't care if things like macros are ugly as long as they produce correct code to present to the typechecker/compiler, so it makes more sense to vibe code the metaprogramming layer to give yourself whatever you need to have straightforward business logic. Conciseness and direct encoding of business logic also helps to keep context focused.
Really this is all true with humans too, but IMO it's multiplied with LLMs because they are insanely capable at dealing with the guts of metaprogramming wizardry if they need to, so you don't end up in a world where that one guy that understands it leaves and then no one can possibly maintain it.
By OSaMaBiNLoGiN 2026-01-2919:20 [flagged]
By rla3rd 2026-01-2917:37 for spark
I haven't used Scala for quite a while now - but a while back they had a serious asshole problem with a lot of the community.
By cbeach 2026-01-2921:57 [flagged]
By mark_l_watson 2026-01-3015:01 I agree. I took Martin's fantastic online Scala class way back when and I was a fan. Now Clojure is a great JVM alternative, and as you say Java has kicked it up a notch.
By ecshafer 2026-01-2918:26 Jobs that you work on hard, complicated things. Scala is relatively popular in Fintech and Finance in general. There's things like Chisel or Spark. But there are relatively few simple CRUD app companies using Scala.
I learned recently that one of the killer apps for Scala seems to be in hardware design. Chisel [0] is the core technology of the best open source RISC-V chips. Chipyard [1] is designing leading edge type OOE and AI chips and all of the code is written in Scala. Personally, I can't wait for some of these designs to start being mass produced and put in laptops and phones.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)
So, as a justification for support of scala, the thing that seems lacking to me is that Chisel seems to still be centered around scala 2? E.g. their recommended template for getting started still uses scala 2 ... so without support to motivate them to use scala 3, it's not obvious that Chisel benefits much from current work on the scala language? I have not fully understood the Chisel project but I see they have a "compiler plugin" which suggests to me that moving fully off scala 2 requires a meaningful redesign.
https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel-template/blob/main/b...
By gmartres 2026-01-2919:22 Chisel picked up Scala 3 support in 7.0.0 released last September (https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel/releases/tag/v7.0.0), right now they cross-compile between Scala 2 and 3 but from what I heard they should eventually move to Scala 3 only to start taking advantage of new features like named tuples (https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/other-new-featu...).
By throwup238 2026-01-2917:00 Chisel absolutely isn’t the type of software that benefits from upgrading because it’s largely standalone. They could be the last project still stuck on 2.x a decade from now and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to its users.
I’ve only used Chisel for a few projects but I’ve never used anything but Chisel in those codebases. Simulation, verification, and all the painful stuff in FPGA/ASIC development depends on non-Scala tooling and all of the inputs (parametrization) are just read in from JSON files produced by scripts in other languages.
It would be nice to be up to date but the hardware NRE is so damn high that working around any limitations in Scala support is a rounding error. Chisel’s outputs are sent out for $X00,000 fab production runs so no one gives a damn whether it’s Scala 2 or 3 as long as it ships a working IC. The last time I used Chisel I was working on a mixed signal design where the Synopsys Fusion Compiler (maybe Custom compiler?) licenses alone ran into the hundreds of thousands per year (iirc it was per seat, so we must have spent over a million per year on Synopsys alone).
By appplication 2026-01-2916:181 reply I’m not super plugged into scala but I work with Spark quite a bit and my observation has been the whole scala 2.13 -> 3 transition is a huge mess for just about everyone who touches it. I don’t have enough hands-on context to understand why it’s so painful but it seems to be similar or worse to the python 2.7 -> 3 transition in terms of sticking friction.
By abeppu 2026-01-2916:45 It is a mess. I've spent some time trying to convert some academic oss projects and some removed features really force large redesigns. I think rather than funding the stuff on this announcement, I wish they would fund a team of experts to work on migration of a prioritized list of projects. This would both provide example patterns of migrating substantial projects and unblock projects who have been saying "we would like to try migrating but library X we use still hasn't"
By nightpool 2026-01-2916:23 Well, a more optimistic take here is that if future development on the Scala language was funded explicitly by/for people who are current using Scala 2, that means that the developers would more clearly understand their requirements in terms of making an easier transition for users moving from Scala 2 -> 3
By nikitaga 2026-01-300:27 This is great news, nice win for Scala.
It's a great language, I've been working with it for 10 years now. Full stack Scala with Scala.js on the frontend is so very nice. My experience is mostly in fintech & healthcare startups where the language helped us get correctness, refactorability, clarity, and high velocity at the same time without blowing up the team size.
Initially I learned Scala on the job, but I've been writing open source Scala for years since then. It's a cool language to learn and explore ideas in, since it has lots of elegantly integrated features (especially FP + OOP).
Scala may not be the #1 most popular language, and that's fine. Popular stuff surely gets the benefits of funding and attention, and sometimes lacking such support is really annoying, like a few years ago when Scala 3 was first released, the IDEs took a looong time to catch up. But I still choose Scala despite those occasional annoyances, even though I also have years of experience in JS / TS and other languages. It's just a much better tool for my needs.
