Rage Against the Ecosystem

Scala's open-source ecosystem is broken: writing and maintaining build configurations is too difficult, and publishing is even harder, coming with the additional friction of having to support an increasing multiplicity of binary targets. But worse, this workflow puts a burden on a few key people in the Scala community to publish their libraries quickly so that their downstream users can publish theirs, and it can take months for some projects to be published. How is it that the multi-billion-dollar Scala software industry is so dependent on so few people? I will introduce Fury, a fast, source-based dependency manager and build tool for Scala which aspires to radically disrupt the ecosystem for the better. Fury defines builds as static data, not code, making viewing them instantaneous and understanding them easy. Fury facilitates a new, distributed, version-controlled and trust-based ecosystem where publishing is as simple as tagging a signed commit and telling users about it. Builds can be external to projects, so there's no need to impose Fury upon any existing developers who are happy using sbt. The utopia we are striving for is a new, fluid and versatile ecosystem in which developers are liberated to publish more easily and frequently, and where it becomes easier for anyone to make contributions to open-source projects.