A lot of Java shops moved from Maven to Gradle, and Gradle builds Scala projects: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/scala_plugin.html

Bazel works well too: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_scala

Maven itself works fine. In nine years of Scala I've never understood what problem SBT is supposed to solve - it seems very complicated to no real benefit.

I loved the incremental compile/watch tests stuff myself. It's been a while, but I do miss having all my tests run every time I save a file.

But I do accept that sbt is not everybody's cup of tea.

I had heard that use case mentioned now that I think about it. To my mind it makes much more sense to have the IDE handle that part; the IDE knows which file I've edited and when I've saved it rather than having to scan the filesystem. But I guess some people must find it useful.

I have never fully understood why people are often upset with SBT.

Sure it is not perfect, but the alternatives are much worse and most of the issues people have with SBT projects are other people abusing the build file.

The REPL, fast incremental builds, continuous unit testing, shared SBT sessions, etc makes my day so much better.

I live all day long with: `~testOnly *WalabySpec -- -z killRoo`.

Whenever I have to jump into an app using Maven or only slightly better Gradle it is so frustrating.

Present (1.1+) SBT is much much nicer. It's the same core, but the new syntax does a great job of exposing what it does. It's still a complex tool, but it has become learnable.

Oh, and it's much faster nowadays.

I'm currently being turned off by SBT