Scala, SWT, and OS X
Mac OS X and the Eclipse SWT do not get along well together. I find Swing to be sluggish and overly verbose, and so I gave SWT a try tonight. As you can see on the SWT website and elsewhere, there's a known issue with SWT and OS X where you have to pass the -XrunOnFirstThread option to Java. I banged my head against the wall a bit trying to figure out how to do this with Scala, until I realized the obvious:
JAVA_OPTS="-XstartOnFirstThread" \
scala -cp target/classes:swt/swt.jar CalliopeSWT
Another lesson learned that may not be obvious: you can't use 64-bit Java with SWT on OS X, which eliminates the Apple-released version of Java 6. (I have no idea about SoyLatte and SWT, but if you know the deal there, please comment.)
Anyway, the limitations of SWT on OS X lead me to think I either need to go back to using Linux or quit trying to use SWT. One good thing came out of the experiment: a Scala port of Bruce Eckel's SWTApplication from Thinking in Java.
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