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The soon to be introduced function literals in Java 8 use invokedynamic rather than being statically compiled. This seems to give the benefits of less compiled 'noise' in the emitted bytecode, which I'm assuming means comparably less compilation time (ignoring all of the other reasons that Scala compilation is slower), as well as less classes to load. Does anyone now if there are any plans to move Scala in this direction? If not, could someone elucidate on the reasons the Scala team aren't going to? This is kind of a follow on from question / point 9 in this question.

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user2335262
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    not really a question for stackoverflow IMHO i would suggest http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ – Philipp Sander Feb 04 '14 at 15:06
  • As it stands, the current wording of the question would likely be closed as primarily opinion based as it is asking for speculation as to the future direction of Scala. Only the people working with Scala would be able to answer - otherwise it would be guesswork. Please do not repost without closing and deleting this question (two copies of the question on the stack exchange network are frowned upon) and look around to see what the quality standards expected on P.SE are. –  Feb 04 '14 at 15:25
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    One reason is that depending on `invokedynamic` means abandoning support for Java 5 and Java 6 and requiring at least Java 7 (or more precisely: abandoning support for version 2 of the JVM spec and requiring version 3). You simply can't do that with a production JVM language until all major JVM vendors have officially end-of-lifed their Java 6 products. – Jörg W Mittag Feb 05 '14 at 00:03
  • I'm not looking for guesswork on this one, but specifically if anyone has any insight into whether there are plans to move across and exactly why not, if not. Jorg's comment goes some way to answering this. I've reworded the question slightly in order to more precisely get at the question I am trying to ask. – user2335262 Feb 06 '14 at 17:50

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You can learn more about it here: http://www.takipioncode.com/2014/01/16/compiling-lambda-expressions-scala-vs-java-8/ or from Martin Odersky interview: http://www.infoq.com/articles/odersky-scala-interview/. I understood that it's not easy or maybe even possible at the moment due to Scala nature.

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