Language semantics

In general, the semantics of the Scala Native language are the same as Scala on the JVM. However, a few differences exist, which we mention here.

Interop extensions

Annotations and types defined scala.scalanative.unsafe may modify semantics of the language for sake of interoperability with C libraries, read more about those in Native code interoperability section.

Multithreading

Scala Native doesn’t yet provide libraries for parallel multi-threaded programming and assumes single-threaded execution by default.

It’s possible to use C libraries to get access to multi-threading and synchronization primitives but this is not officially supported at the moment.

Finalization

Finalize method from java.lang.Object is never called in Scala Native.

Undefined behavior

Generally, Scala Native follows most of the special error conditions similarly to JVM:

  1. Arrays throw IndexOutOfBoundsException on out-of-bounds access.
  2. Casts throw ClassCastException on incorrect casts.
  3. Accessing a field or method on null, throwing null` exception, throws NullPointerException.
  4. Integer division by zero throws ArithmeticException.

There are a few exceptions:

  1. Stack overflows are undefined behavior and would typically segfault on supported architectures instead of throwing StackOverflowError.
  2. Exhausting a heap space results in crash with a stack trace instead of throwing OutOfMemoryError.

Continue to Native code interoperability.