Gradle Support for the

Scala and sbt Communities

Develocity has extended its support to the Scala/sbt community with the release of sbt for Develocity. Scala developers can also speed up their builds by taking advantage of the world’s only parallel compiler for the Scala language, Hydra.


Develocity Strategic Support for sbt

The Develocity strategy is to support all important build systems and language ecosystems in order to provide a single-vendor solution for maximizing developer productivity leveraging the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). The release of sbt support for the Develocity Build Scan® service is an important step in that direction. Develocity already supports Gradle Build Tool, Apache Maven, and most recently, Bazel.

The Develocity multi-build-system solution strategy is based on the strategic premise that the build system market is and will continue to be fragmented within and across language ecosystems and even within most large corporations. This presented an opportunity to create a common build and test acceleration and analytics application that democratizes the benefits of DPE with a “no dev team left behind” approach to improving developer productivity and the developer experience. As a result, Develocity is independent from any single build tool and the unifying technology-enabling platform behind the practice of DPE.

Gradle’s Commitment to the Scala Community

Scala is a JVM-compatible programming language that was created in 2001 by Martin Odersky to combine functional programming and object-oriented programming into one language. The name is derived from Scalable Language. Scala was designed to improve upon Java, so you can call Java methods, inherit from Java classes, and more. Scala is commonly used in data science, machine learning, finance-related applications, content management systems, online learning platforms, and distributed applications.

  • Martin Odersky serves in a technical advisory role to Gradle. He is a computer scientist and professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
  • Develocity support for sbt brings the leading Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) solution platform to the sbt and Scala communities.
  • Gradle Inc. is committed to the continued development of Hydra and leveraging its proven global customer support services to ensure customer success.
Key Develocity Benefits for sbt Users

Available Now:


Build Scan®
Build Scan for sbt builds and tests gives Scala developers detailed data for every build so they can quickly find the root cause of build and test failures and fix them on their own without re-running broken builds to reproduce problems.

To facilitate debugging, build data can be filtered by timeframe (e.g., show me only builds run in the last seven days); username (i.e., the operating system user that executed the build); the name of the root project; build tool and version; custom values and tags; and the outcome of the running build.

Build Scan links can be shared with teammates in the same or different physical location to collaborate on build issues. Build Scan can be easily compared to understand the differences in behavior (e.g., the same build succeeds locally but fails on CI).

The FREE Build Scan service for sbt is available. This service provides the core functionality of the commercial service, which is delivered as a part of Develocity, including the following features and reports:

  • Build Performance Summary
  • Failures Report
  • Task Execution Insights
  • Test Execution Results
  • Flaky Test Detection
  • Console Log Functionality
  • Custom Values & Tagging
  • Environment Data

The commercial Build Scan service for sbt includes cross-build aggregation and insights, data retention, and enterprise-grade data privacy.


Build Cache
Develocity provides the first fully integrated Build Cache solution for sbt and supports both local and remote (distributed) caching. Remote caching dramatically accelerates your local and CI builds by sharing and reusing compilation and test outputs across your entire organization. This unique feature offers an entirely new way to optimize the performance of your sbt builds.


Failure Analytics
Failure Analytics pulls data from every build and test run so you can make build reliability a priority. By identifying where and when failures occur, you can invest in the right places, fix issues early before their impact grows, and reduce the time you spend troubleshooting.


Management Reporting & Insights
While Develocity helps you react to tactical performance bottlenecks and daily failures, it also enables you to respond proactively to systemic problems and longer-term performance regressions using dashboards that make key metrics and KPIs more observable and actionable.


Performance Continuity
Performance Continuity refers to a rich set of analytics, profiling, and diagnostic tools to sustain the achieved improvements in developer feedback time and build reliability

Future Capabilities:


Predictive Test Selection
Leveraging machine learning, Predictive Test Selection can save significant testing time by identifying, prioritizing, and running only tests that are likely to provide useful feedback during test runs.


Test Distribution
This approach accelerates test execution and complements build caching while addressing many of the limitations of single-machine parallelism and CI fanout. It does this by distributing test execution work to remote executors.

Get Started with an sbt Build Scan

An easy way to get started and get exposure to some Develocity developer productivity tools is to try sbt Build Scan for free

Create an sbt Build Scan in 30 Seconds

Hydra Overview | It Just Works!

Hydra is the world’s only parallel compiler for the Scala language. Hydra works by parallelizing all of the Scala compiler phases, taking full advantage of the many cores available in modern hardware. 

Hydra is based on the open-source Scala compiler with a focus on parallelizing the work inside the compiler and maintaining strong compatibility guarantees. Certain components are replaced or improved in order to make parallelization possible.

Being based on the open-source compiler means that Hydra supports the full Scala language, including macros and compiler plugins. Hydra is more than binary compatible with open-source Scala, it generates the same bytecode.

We keep Hydra in-sync with Scala and we release on the same schedule. New features and improvements in Scala are also available in Hydra in the corresponding release. From a language feature perspective, Hydra and the Scala compiler are 100% identical.

Key Capabilities | Compile Scala Faster

Multicore compilation
This takes advantage of the many cores available in modern hardware to achieve impressive Scala compilation speedup.

Seamless  integration
Seamless integration with development environments means that the only thing you notice is that Scala compiles fast! Hydra supports Gradle Build Tool, Maven, and sbt.

Compile-time monitoring
When compiling, Hydra automatically collects statistics about your Scala project and points out bottlenecks in compilation via a modern web dashboard.
Learn more about Hydra

Contact Us