Welcome to the Ninth ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Scala, 2018!

Videos are available online.

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages.

The Scala Symposium is the leading forum for researchers and practitioners related to the Scala programming language. We welcome a broad spectrum of research topics and support many submission formats for industry and academia alike.

This year’s Scala Symposium is co-located with ICFP 2018 and Strange Loop 2018.

Follow @scala_symposium on Twitter for updates.

Keynote Speaker

This year we are delighted to have Sébastien Doeraene as the invited Speaker!

Sébastien Doeraene

Sébastien Doeraene is a compiler/runtime systems hacker and a Scala enthusiast, now executive director of the Scala Center. He holds a PhD from EPFL, having worked under the supervision of Prof. Martin Odersky, and a master's degree in computer science engineering from Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is best known as the author of Scala.js. When he is not busy coding, he sings in choirs and a cappella groups such as the Ensemble Vocal Évohé, or rides around on a unicycle.

Our Sponsors

We are very thankful for the sponsoring of our great partner Twitter! Sponsorship money covers registration fees for talented students that have been selected to present Scala projects.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

We seek submissions on all topics related to Scala, including (but not limited to):

• Language design and implementation – language extensions, optimization, and performance evaluation.
• Library design and implementation patterns for extending Scala – stand-alone Scala libraries, embedded domain-specific languages, combining language features, generic and meta-programming.
• Formal techniques for Scala-like programs – formalizations of the language, type system, and semantics, formalizing proposed language extensions and variants, dependent object types, type and effect systems.
• Concurrent and distributed programming – libraries, frameworks, language extensions, programming models, performance evaluation, experimental results.
• Big data and machine learning libraries and applications using the Scala programming language.
• Safety and reliability – pluggable type systems, contracts, static analysis and verification, runtime monitoring.
• Interoperability with other languages and runtimes, such as JavaScript, Java 8 (lambdas), Graal and others.
• Tools – development environments, debuggers, refactoring tools, testing frameworks.
• Case studies, experience reports, and pearls.

Important dates

• No abstract registration
• Paper submission June 13th, 2018
• Paper notification: July 13th, 2018
• Student talk submission: Aug 10th, 2018
• Camera ready: Aug 3rd, 2018
• Student talk notification: Aug 31st, 2018

All deadlines are at the end of the day, “Anywhere on Earth” (AoE).

Submission Format

To accommodate the needs of researchers and practitioners, as well as beginners and experts alike, we seek several kinds of submissions, all in acmart/sigplan style, 10pt font.

• Full papers (at most 10 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Short papers (at most 4 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Tool papers (at most 4 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Student talks (short abstract only, in plain text)

Accepted papers (either full papers, short ones or tool papers, but not student talks) will be published in the ACM Digital Library. Detailed information for each kind of submission is given below. Formatting requirements are detailed in Instructions for Authors.

Please note that at least one author of each accepted contribution must attend the symposium and present the work. In the case of tool demonstration papers, a live demonstration of the described tool is expected.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Full and Short Papers

Full and short papers should describe novel ideas, experimental results, or projects related to the Scala language. In order to encourage lively discussion, submitted papers may describe work in progress. Additionally, short papers may present problems and raise research questions interesting for the Scala language community. All papers will be judged on a combination of correctness, significance, novelty, clarity, and interest to the community.

In general, papers should explain their original contributions, identifying what has been accomplished, explaining why it is significant, and relating it to previous work (also for other languages where appropriate).

Tool Papers

Tool papers need not necessarily report original research results; they may describe a tool of interest, report practical experience that will be useful to others, new Scala idioms, or programming pearls. In all cases, such a paper must make a contribution which is of interest to the Scala community, or from which other members of the Scala community can benefit.

Where appropriate, authors are encouraged to include a link to the tool’s website. For inspiration, you might consider advice in https://conf.researchr.org/track/POPL-2016/pepm-2016-main#Tool-Paper-Advice, which we however treat as non-binding. In case of doubts, please contact the program chairs.

Student Talks

In addition to regular papers and tool demos, we also solicit short student talks by bachelor/master/PhD students. A student talk is not accompanied by paper (it is sufficient to submit a short abstract of the talk in plain text). Student talks are about 5-10 minutes long, presenting ongoing or completed research related to Scala. In previous years, each student with an accepted student talk received a grant (donated by our sponsors) covering registration and/or travel costs.

Open Source Talks

We will also accept a limited number of short talks about open-source projects using Scala presented by contributors. An open-source talk is not accompanied by a paper (it is sufficient to submit a short abstract of the talk in plain text). Open-source talks are about ~10 minutes long and about topics of relevance to the symposium, for instance (but not only) presenting or announcing an open-source project that would be of interest to the Scala community.

Submission Website

The submission will be managed through HotCRP: https://scala18.hotcrp.com/

For questions and additional clarifications, please contact the conference organizers.

Printable version

A short, printable version for distribution via notice boards is available as letter size PDF.

Why Sponsor Scala’18?

The Scala Symposium is a premier forum for researchers, practitioners and the open-source community. Since its inception in 2010, it annually serves as a platform for Scala enthusiast from industry and research to exchange challenges and ideas, to discuss the latest findings and to envision the Scala of tomorrow.

By sponsoring Scala’18, your company expresses its commitment to the Scala language and research community. The money will mostly be used to fund undergrad / early grad students who are selected to give short student talks. We believe that supporting these young talents will have a sustainable impact on the future of the Scala.

We offer two different sponsorship levels:

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, we love to hear from you! Get in touch with our co-organizer Jonathan Brachthäuser (jonathan.brachthaeuser[at]uni-tuebingen.de).

Submissions should use the ACM acmart template, sigplan subformat, 10 point font, and author-year citation style. The resulting style is the same as last year. All submissions should be in PDF format.

LaTeX and Word templates are available from SIGPLAN resources. For authors using LaTeX, the appropriate template for Scala’18 authors is in the file acmart-sigplanproc-template.tex. As documented in the template, submissions should be prepared using the sigplan and 10pt options and, for authors using double-blind submissions, the anonymous option. The use of the review option is also strongly encouraged but not required (The review option will add line numbers, which will make it easier for reviewers to reference specific parts of your paper in their comments, but should have absolutely no other effect on the typesetting). Details of available technical support for LaTeX-specific questions is available at http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template#h-technical-support.

To enable author-year citation style, authors should enable the LaTeX command \citestyle{acmauthoryear} in the provided template. Otherwise, for correct use of author-year citation style please consult advice on citations in OOPSLA’17 instructions for authors.

Page Limits

• Full papers (at most 10 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Short papers (at most 4 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Tool papers (at most 4 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Student talks (short abstract only, in plain text)

Concurrent Submissions

Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as described by SIGPLAN’s Republication Policy. Submitters should also be aware of ACM’s Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism.

Publication Date (Digital Library Early Access Warning)

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Single- or Double-blind submissions

Scala’18 is a single-blind conference. All submitted papers are expected to have author information.