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Comment by AhtiK | Hacker News Reader

There's just one sad trouble with the current state of tooling: Scala and SBT in IntelliJ IDEA do not go together.

Each Scala run inside SBT-enabled project takes >10 secs minimum to run. Every single run. SBT make is invoking the full SBT startup sequence and is unable to reuse the session. This comes from the context of using Play Framework where you can't substitute SBT with something else.

I do hope that SBT server becomes a reality at some point and IntelliJ Scala plugin is able to fully use it.

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Totally agree. I don't understand what the Scala compile server does. It's far slower than using SBT (or Activator, when working on a Play project).

I always just keep a console open and compile from the command line, because IntelliJ compilation is huge waste of time. I rarely debug because that means I'd have to wait 2 minutes for IntelliJ to do it's thing before it launches.

Oh, and the test output is inconsistent. It often reports that all tests pass even when they are failing.

Other than that - and it is a huge inconvenience - IntelliJ is still awesome for Scala development. Everything else the editor is capable of easily justifies it's place in Scala development.

I've been developing a Play app in IntelliJ for the past year. When run in development mode ($ activator run) it recompiles only the necessary files when you make a change, save, and reload the page in the web browser. I can even switch branches to another developer's work and don't have to restart the server. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Maybe you have something set up incorrectly.

SBT and Play work together great and activator run recompiles incrementally, this setup is OK.

The issue is with IntelliJ -- when I want to run Play app from IntelliJ, not from command prompt, to get easier debug support when running the app or junit tests. Running tests from IntelliJ is more convenient than using activator shell.

Yes, I could provide -jvm-debug flag to the activator command line but this works only when fork:=false, which can't be always used.

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