Yes, it is. And I suspect the Scala people aren't advocating that it move away from the JVM.
However, I can definitely say, should a Scala on LLVM become available with trivial FFI with native code and close to compiled C performance even for the Scala interpreter (this is definitely possible), I would heartily switch to Scala from C.
I absolutely love the idea of Scala on the LLVM back end. That opens up a whole new world to me which currently doesn't exist.
I've recently been trying to design my own language on the LLVM Jit. So far, many of the design decisions I am making are very similar to, or the same as Scala, even though I am familiar with many different languages.
What's missing from Scala for me personally, is precisely what is proposed in this paper.
Functional and hybrid functional languages benefit greatly from a highly tuned GC. I don't see LLVM supporting something on par with the JVM's collector anytime soon so I think you'll lose a lot of the speed you see with Scala on the JVM unfortunately.
However, I can definitely say, should a Scala on LLVM become available with trivial FFI with native code and close to compiled C performance even for the Scala interpreter (this is definitely possible), I would heartily switch to Scala from C.
I absolutely love the idea of Scala on the LLVM back end. That opens up a whole new world to me which currently doesn't exist.
I've recently been trying to design my own language on the LLVM Jit. So far, many of the design decisions I am making are very similar to, or the same as Scala, even though I am familiar with many different languages.
What's missing from Scala for me personally, is precisely what is proposed in this paper.