Which IDE for Scala 2.8?

Question

This is the same question for older version of Scala, but they say that Eclipse plugin has been improved vastly. Is it the best IDE now? How do different Scala IDE compare t

Answer 1

My experiences clearly point to IntelliJ IDEA:

About six months ago, when I started a serious Scala (multi module) project, I had to abandon Eclipse as my favorite Java IDE and switched to IntelliJ (9.0.x). Eclipse Scala IDE was way to buggy and often stopped responding at some point, even for the most simple projects. For CI (Hudson) and command line build, I depend on Maven (with Scala plugin). The Maven dependencies (incl. Scala libs) are picked up nicely by IntelliJ.

A few days back I updated to IDEA X (CE) with the current plugin (nightly build) and work became even smoother. Although fsc still terminates after a while when inactive.

From what I see, I'd like to add, that there seems to be way more activity on the IntelliJ side to respond to bugs and improve the plugin continuously. Correct me when I'm wrong, but Eclipse Scala IDE development seems almost stalled. Still no 'official' Helios release!

NB: Just to provide some context (not bragging, really): The aforementioned project consists of about 25 Scala modules (POMs), 5 Java modules, 325 Scala files with a total of about 360 Scala classes, case classes and traits (> 19 kLOC, including comments). My platform is OS X 10.6, Scala 2.8.1, Java 1.6.

UPDATE: After having the need for pretty extensive refactorings (mainly move class, rename package), I discovered that the recent IDEA 10.0.1 plugin 0.4.413 (and probably older versions, too) has quite some problems getting stuff right. I don't want to explain the specifics, but I (almost ever) ended up manually fixing unresolved references or otherwise messed-up code. You can have a look at http://youtrack.jetbrains.net to get an idea.

For everyone who is really considering doing some serious development with Scala, I strongly recommend to evaluate the IDEs in question beyond the basics. When you are into an agile approach, which in my option requires a painless refactoring support without surprises (especially in multi-module projects), things are pretty tight at the moment.

It would be pretty neat, if someone came up with a IDE independent specification-like list of refactorings (and desired outcomes), which could be used to verify an IDE's refactoring support.