Try Faster Scala Compiler in IntelliJ IDEA 13.0.2

Alexander Podkhalyuzin

The latest update to Scala plugin (v0.30.375) available for IntelliJ IDEA 13.0.2 lets you choose what compiler you want to use: SBT incremental or IntelliJ IDEA.

The latter is actually the new built-in incremental Scala compiler based on IntelliJ IDEA internal byte-code dependency analyzer, that is capable of achieving up to 25% faster compiling speeds by ignoring certain Scala-specific dependencies between source files. We call this the lower precision approach, because we’re sacrificing a little bit of accuracy for more performance.

Here are the benchmarks of how the plugin compiles itself:

The new compiler is now used by default, so you can try it right away and see how faster your code is compiled, and if you need precision more than speed, you can always switch back to SBT.

Note: Sometimes when compilation starts producing unexpected or weird errors it helps to rebuild the project entirely. If it doesn’t though, contact us and we’ll look into the problem.

Feel free to share your feedback on the discussion forum and submit bug reports to our issue tracker.

Enjoy!