[ESS] Interest in scala support?

[Phillip Lord]

Blair Christian <bchristian at pyaanalytics.com> writes:
> There are quite a few different types/versions of scala-modes in
> emacs, but they are using it like a formal software development IDE
> (eg ensime) as opposed to focussing on the interpreter (REPL) for
> interactive analysis. [if I'm wrong here and there is already great
> emacs support for interactive scala use, please let me know- I grepped
> through the scala and scala2 emacs modes for words like "submit",
> "step", "line" and didn't see anything] 


Well, those things are not in scala mode because they are in ensime.
Most of the evaluative languages use this paradigm -- you have a major
mode which is language specific, and then a minor mode for interaction.
In this case, scala-mode and ensime.

It's certainly true that the REPL interaction of ensime is fairly heavy
weight (I think it requires sbt) but you are probably going to need this
anyway to import some stats libraries.

If you value line by line step through (which makes a lot of sense for
something like ESS, and less for general programming in scala), then
you'd probably be better of starting from ensime and adding that.

Alternatively, you could build a new client to the ensime-server; some
one has just done this with clojure for instance to get a lighter-weight
integration (https://github.com/sanel/monroe). It uses the same client
as CIDER (https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider) which is the heavier
weight environment.

Phil