The only thing on your list on your blog [1] that's still true is that we care about PL research. Since 2.10, we've worked really hard on improving the migration between major versions, and the feedback has been very positive. We'll keep working on finding the right balance between ease of migration and fixing issues in the libraries. Scala 2.13 will be a library release, with further modularisation of the library (towards a core that we can evolve much more slowly, and modules that can move more quickly, but where you can opt to stay with older versions as you prefer).
We've also invested heavily in incremental compilation in sbt. Sbt is meant for use as a shell, and it's super powerful when used like that. When I'm hacking the compiler in IntelliJ, recompiles of some of the biggest source files in the compiler (Typers.scala, say) take just a few seconds. I rarely have time for office chair sword fights anymore.
With Scala 2.13, half of my team at Lightbend is dedicated to compiler performance. We'll have some graphs to show you soon, but our internal benchmarking shows our performance has steadily improved since 2.10.
We've also invested heavily in incremental compilation in sbt. Sbt is meant for use as a shell, and it's super powerful when used like that. When I'm hacking the compiler in IntelliJ, recompiles of some of the biggest source files in the compiler (Typers.scala, say) take just a few seconds. I rarely have time for office chair sword fights anymore.
With Scala 2.13, half of my team at Lightbend is dedicated to compiler performance. We'll have some graphs to show you soon, but our internal benchmarking shows our performance has steadily improved since 2.10.