Dotty 0.12

Also in Dotty news: several days ago, Dotty 0.12, the latest milestone on the way to Scala 3, was released. You can read the full blog post here.

There’s a lot of good stuff there, but I’ll particularly call out:

• The new extension method syntax is in. This is super-important, as it will be largely replacing implicit classes with a new tool that looks generally easier to use. The syntax takes a little getting to, but has some absolutely lovely implications once you get the hang of it: for example, infix operator extensions are really intuitive.
• The new TASTy reflection mechanism, which fills in some of the niche currently occupied by macros, is getting more fleshed out.
• Typeclass derivation (which I’ve talked about before) has made it into master. This should make it much easier to use typeclasses in routine Scala code without additional dependencies.

Check it out — the Dotty project is getting steadily more exciting…