Re: Scala package

[Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at>]

Am Dienstag, den 18.05.2021, 07:15 -0400 schrieb Julien Lepiller:
> The old scala is written in a superset of java5, that requires PiCo
> to build, and PiCo was built with JaCo. They were developped at EPFL,
> and you can find a binary for it, but no source: 
> http://zenger.org/jaco/
> 
> Apparently, JaCo was later reimplemented in Keris, whose source code
> is available. However, KeCo (the Keris compiler) is written in Keris.
> 
> It is not even clear that building an old version of scala is going
> to work, as the language evolved a lot since then.
> 
> I think the best way to bootstrap would be to reimplement Scala in
> another language. I tried that too, but even the parser is crazy.
Thanks Julien and Ricardo for the detailed explanation of what goes
wrong here.

Would a bootstrap chain from 2.0.x work at least, so that the crazy
Scala parser can target a specific (early) version and we get a
slightly smaller binary or are the gains from that too minimal?  This
is also a concern going forward, can we always hope to "bootstrap" the
next Scala version with the one currently packaged in Guix?

> Le 18 mai 2021 05:44:42 GMT-04:00, Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net
> > a écrit :
> > Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at> writes:
> > 
> > >  Hi Julien,
> > > 
> > >  Am Dienstag, den 18.05.2021, 01:01 +0200 schrieb Julien 
> > >  Lepiller:
> > > > Hi Guix!
> > > > 
> > > > I have the attached file that build Scala, although it's not
> > > > bootstrapped at all. It contains %binary-scala, a few 
> > > > dependencies of
> > > > Scala we haven't packaged yet, and the final scala, built from
> > > > %binary-scala, without sbt (which requires Scala too).
> > > > 
> > > > Since I've tried and failed to bootstrap Scala for so long, I 
> > > > think
> > > > it's time to give up. I can't always create miracles.
> > > 
> > >  Some points relevant to bootstrapping:
> > >  - The last version, that ships "scalai" written in Java seems
> > > to 
> > >  be 
> > >    v1.4.0+4.  Perhaps one can use scalai to bootstrap scalac 
> > >    within it.
> > >  - The last version, that does not "require" sbt is 2.11.x,
> > >    though with your workaround we can also build later versions.
> > 
> > We tried building a clean bootstrap chain for Scala for years. 
> > Back then I went down the rabbit hole and found that early scalac 
> > is written in Pizza; but it turned out that Pizza is written in 
> > Pizza and is released under the old Artistic License, which is 
> > considered non-free.
> > 
> >     https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2018-04-08.log#230002
> >     https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2018-04-09.log#073740
> > 
> > I pointed a branch at an old Scala commit that contains the old 
> > Socos compiler source, which ostensibly are written in Java, but 
> > actually are not:
> > 
> >     https://github.com/rekado/scala-bootstrap/tree/bootstrap
> > 
> > This is at around version 1.4.0.4, as you wrote above.
> > 
> > Since the old days Scala Native has grown considerably, and 
> > perhaps we can reuse some of its native libraries.  I’m not too 
> > hopeful, because the bulk of it is still written in Scala, 
> > obviously, but there are parts that are written in C / C++, which 
> > might come in handy.
> > 
> >     https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native