Making Scala Scripting Actually Good with Mill, Scalar Warsaw, 27 March 2026

Haoyi Li demonstrates how to use Scala and the Mill build tool for robust, high-performance scripting to replace Bash and Python.

This talk will explore the use of Scala as a scripting language, replacing the Bash and Python scripts common throughout the industry. We will walk through live-coded demonstrations of how the JVM's benefits of performance, compile-time safety, and vast library ecosystem are advantages over traditional script platforms, but also how language verbosity, build tool overhead, and lack of convenient libraries hampers the efforts. Lastly we will demonstrate how script-focused tooling is able to smooth over some of those issues, simplifying build configuration and providing suitable libraries to make the JVM truly a world-class scripting environment as robust as any scripting language out there. The companion article for this video is published at mill-build.org/blog/20-making-scala-scripting-actually-good.…