mill-scala-cli is a Mill plugin, that allows to compile Scala modules with Scala CLI rather than with Mill's ZincWorker.

mill-scala-cli was used in Scala CLI's own build. The motivation for writing it originated from incremental compilation issues seen with Mill's ZincWorker in the Scala CLI build at the time. Note that these issues now seem to be addressed.

When using mill-scala-cli, compilation is delegated to Scala CLI, which delegates it to Bloop, who might be using Zinc slightly differently. Incremental compilation issues went away with mill-scala-cli at the time. (Later on, Mill >= 0.10.7 didn't suffer from these issues, so Scala CLI stopped using mill-scala-cli.)

Add a dependency towards mill-scala-cli in your build.sc file (or any Mill build file you want to use ScalaCliCompile from), and import ScalaCliCompile:

import $ivy.`io.github.alexarchambault.mill::mill-scala-cli::0.1.2`
import scala.cli.mill.ScalaCliCompile

Note that mill-scala-cli only supports Mill 0.10.x.

Then have your Scala modules extend ScalaCliCompile:

object foo extends SbtModule with ScalaCliCompile {
  def scalaVersion = "2.13.8"
}

ScalaCliCompile can be added to modules extending mill.scalalib.ScalaModule, which includes SbtModule, CrossScalaModule, CrossSbtModule, …

Note that Scala CLI is disabled by default on CIs, where incremental compilation is somewhat less sollicited.

Note also that Scala CLI is only enabled on CPUs / OSes that have native Scala CLI launchers (as of writing this, Linux / Windows / macOS on x86_64).

def scalaCliVersion = "0.1.6"

Add them to extraScalaCliOptions:

def extraScalaCliOptions = T {
  super.extraScalaCliOptions() ++ Seq("-v", "-v")
}

def enableScalaCli = true

By default, this is false on CIs and on unsupported CPUs / OSes (see above).

def compileScalaCliUrl = Some("https://…/scala-cli-x86_64-pc-linux.gz")

Both compressed and non-compressed Scala CLI launchers are accepted (compressed launchers should have the right compression method extension). Decompression is handled by the ArchiveCache capabilities of coursier.

Benefits:

• under-the-hood, relies on a different codebase interfacing with Zinc, which can address issues you might see in Mill (or it might suffer from different issues!)

Drawbacks:

• no-op incremental compilation (when no sources changed, and nothing new needs to be compiled) has a small but noticeable cost - it takes a small amount of time (maybe in the ~100s of ms), which adds up when running Mill tasks involving numerous modules

Limitations:

• even though mill-scala-cli uses Bloop under-the-hood, the dependencies between modules compiled via mill-scala-cli are not "seen" by Bloop - each module lives in its own workspace, and dependencies between modules simply consist in putting a module byte code directory in the class path of its dependees, which trumps some Bloop optimizations

Compilation via Scala CLI from Mill was originally added in the Scala CLI build by Krzysztof Romanowski. It was later customized, then extracted and moved to the repository here by Alex Archambault.