Compile CBT itself with Scala Native

[frgomes]

Porting CBT to Scala Native would potentially allow an entire tool chain independent of the JVM, including the build tool, which is a very important component of a tool chain. At the moment, Scala Native still needs the JVM, since it is built by SBT.

Update by @cvogt: @densh and I expect Scala Native support might make CBT's permanently running background process unnecessary and further reduce the 100-200ms runtime overhead.

[cvogt]

current dependencies, that would need to be made optional or ported to Scala Native:

dependencies:

• scala.xml
• "org.eclipse.jgit", "org.eclipse.jgit", "4.2.0.201601211800-r"
  on OSX for native file change watching
• jna

from JDK
io, nio, nio.charset, reflection, security, util.jar, net,
util.concurrent.HashMap, javax.xml.bind.annotation.adapters.HexBinaryAdapter

[cvogt]

for git, we may be able to just drop in the command line tool instead of jgit

[sjrd]

FWIW, nio.Buffer & Co, and nio.charset.*, can be copy-pasted from Scala.js. There's nothing JS-specific in their implementation. There's also already a lot of the abstract and in-memory Streams and Reader/Writers of java.io.*.

[cvogt]

https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/install.html may allow replacing barbary watch service by combining cbt with an external tool rather than letting it be aware of file watching see https://gitter.im/cvogt/cbt?at=579787637c9324e20effd586

[Jasper-M]

Porting CBT to Scala Native would potentially allow an entire tool chain independent of the JVM, including the build tool, which is a very important component of a tool chain. At the moment, Scala Native still needs the JVM, since it is built by SBT.

Can scala native compile itself? Otherwise a tool chain independent of the JVM is long way away, I think.

[densh]

@Jasper-M We can compile pretty much anything, but we can't always link what was compiled due to missing symbols in java.* namespace.

[Jasper-M]

@densh so a native Scala Native compiler will (relatively) soon be possible?

[densh]

@Jasper-M Yep, that's not a blocker. We've just merged initial File I/O (java.io.*) and there is ongoing effort to support java.nio.*and Zip/Jar I/O in the works.