I agree. Scalac compilation speed and SBT magic were two of the less enjoyable aspects of using Scala. And cross building was not only annoyingly slow and complex but also very expensive (likelh great for the likes of Sonatype and JFrog though 🤑). Tbjs may have been born out of naivety and a stubborn attempt to fit Scala into the existing Maven ecosystem at all costs, but the Scala community certainly didn’t do much to help itself back in the day.

The plan for Scala 3 was to organise and optimise the implicit/macro/typeclass/shapeless/advanced type-level programming stuff that slowed down the compiler, but the hype around the language (and the money to keep funding the ecosystem) just died before it got there. The jobs left, at least here in the UK, are kinda sad (maintaining old Spark stuff while the company migrates to Python, maintaining old, overcomplicated ZIO projects that the business is too afraid to touch, migrating away from formerly open source tools to forks, etc).

Still a pity. Despite all the problems, I really enjoyed the language. It hit a sweet spot for me. Powerful and elegant without fighting the real world like Haskell or, you know, being Rust 🤣.