SF Scala: Grzegorz Kossakowski, Limits of Scala's Typechecking Speed

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us! ----- Scala's compilation speed is often listed as the top priority for the future language evolution and implementation. A while ago Grzegorz set out to explore equally puzzling and fascinating question anchored at the compilation speed: is Scala's design fundamentally flawed or have we done so far a poor job at the implementation? To study this question, Grzegorz started Kentucky Mule - a research project focused on exploring the limits of Scala's typechecking speed. The typechecking is the bottleneck in the Scala compiler and it's the hardest part to make go faster. In Kentucky Mule, Grzegorz took a fresh look at the architecture of the Scala compiler with focus on both raw single-threaded performance and unlocking parallel and distributed compilation. The talk will touch on: why the compiler speed is a hard problem the growing evidence it's a solvable problem In Grzegorz words, "I'd like to send an upbeat ripple through Scala universe". Speaker: Grzegorz Kossakowski Grzegorz has been involved in the Scala development over the years. First as a student at EPFL, later as an employee of Typesafe where he worked on the Scala compiler and tools surrounding it. The compilation speed has been his focus over the years: early on, he spent a summer working with Martin Odersky optimizing scalac, later he worked on redesigning zinc (the incremental compiler for Scala) that l…