Scala developers have won a grant from the European Union

Soon the creator of Scala Martin Odersky (Martin Odersky) will be able to double the number of its development team, the official blog said. The Scala team, which is based at EPFL (Lausanne Federal Polytechnic School), will receive EUR 2.3 million from the European Research Council in the next five years. They managed to win a five-year grant in the framework of the “Popular Parallel Programming” competition. Thus, Scala has acquired a reliable source of funding for the coming years.

The purpose of the grant is to overcome the parallel programming barrier, which has become very relevant in the light of the sharply increased popularity of multi-core and multiprocessor computing systems.

Scala is a functional and object-oriented programming language based on Java and .NET. It initially includes some parallelization constructs.

In the extended competitive project description ( PDF ), Oder explains that the natural way to parallelize various applications is to create domain-specific language (DSL) for each application, be it machine learning, fluid dynamics, analytics, or financial modeling . He cites Facebook and Google as examples of successful parallelization of specific tasks (social graph and search, respectively).
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But at the same time in the case of DSL based on Scala Oder offers to use the "virtualization of language" (language virtualization). This is an innovative approach that combines polymorphic attachments with subject-oriented optimizations and step-by-step compilation. At the first level of each DSL, high-level libraries are created on Scala, which practically provides a common platform for the entire DSL family.