Microsoft is funding a project to make Scala available within the .Net and Mono. The Scala website is running an interview with Miguel Garcia, the developer behind the project.
According to Garcia, you can already use Scala with .Net. There are some limitations now, but he says they will be removed by fall. “If you have a Scala program working on the JVM then for the most part you only need to recompile it with the Scala.Net compiler and it will run there too,” he says.
The limitations at the moment are:
The key limitation for the moment is that Scala programs cannot use libraries in .Net that are compiled using CLR generics, such as the .Net collections. However, for this particular example that’s a minor limitation as the much better Scala collections library would be the natural developer choice anyway. Just to be clear: it’s only CLR generics that are not implemented in the Scala.Net compiler, all the Scala features (including Scala generics) are available to the programmer. The .Net generics will be supported in the fall.
There’s already a Scala plug-in for Visual Studio, but many features – such as code completion, code browsing and line breaks – won’t be available until fall.
