Though I might argue that one of Scala's biggest issues in my eyes, performance, is mostly _not_ a JVM limitation.
For example, a Scala for-loop calls functions on each iteration, and immutable containers need to be garbage collected for each modification. Both of these could be compiled away in many common cases (like C++ or Rust do, but Scala's compiler doesn't, unless they've changed that in the last couple of years).
And for TS I don't think I have to mention the quality of the underlying JS ecosystem :)
On the other hand, of course Rust is still on 1.x, GAT is still on the roadmap (though the RFC recently entered into final comment period (or how it's called), yaay!, and then a bunch of legitimate criticism was submitted..., so it might still take year(s))
Which is a shame because I did a hobby project with it and it was super fun and liberating compared to old java.
Well, they didn’t break the existing language, so not sure. It depends on what do you find readable/difficult. Because contrary to the usual opinion on the language, I believe it is not “difficult” - it has much fewer exceptional rules than Java for example. Sure, some features are more expressive and that comes with big responsibility, but to actually answer your question, some implicit usage is indeed cleaned up making it much less magical-looking.
But scala 3 has been a very huge update, including having a new compile flag that will turn to language “null-safe” (so a nullable String will have String | Null as a type). So it might be worth it to have a new look at the language.
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I spent a lot of time reading r/rust, various blog posts before going beyond helloworld in it.
To me it's in the same category as Scala (ZIO) or TypeScript. Both are very powerful, a joy to work with them, until the low-leven limitations hit in (JVM or JS).
However I don't interpret that as a sign of oh we need to go back to assembly, but more like, okay, we need to accept that our tools and the problems we use them on are not in harmony (yet).