Scala gets a boost by way of a 2.3 million Euro grant to implement parallel processing features. Perhaps all open source languages could be funded this way?

One of the funding avenues for open source software that is often overlooked when discussing the bigger picture is the research grant. True not many open source projects are doing anything that can be considered ground breaking in the sense of computer science research but even those that are tend not to think of applying for grants. The Scala team working at EPFL in Switzerland are clearly hooked into the academic grant system because they have just been awarded a 2.3 million Euro grant from the European Research Council over five years. This will allow the Scala team to double in size.

The focus of their funded research is to be on the all-important topic of parallel programming. Scala is a functional language with objects, which runs on the JVM and has some interesting parallel processing constructs based on the actor model. An actor is essentially an object that runs concurrently and engages in message passing, 

The new research which will be in collaboration with groups at Stanford University's Pervasive Parallelism Lab, will look at adding DSL (Domain Specific Languages) to Scala that provide access to CUDA, OPenCL and C/MPI so on. More immediately, Scala 2.9 will make use of multiple cores to implement parallel collections.

More Information

http://www.scala-lang.org/

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579

http://ppl.stanford.edu/papers/ppopp20-chafi.pdf