This doc page is specific to features shipped in Scala 2, which have either been removed in Scala 3 or replaced by an alternative. Unless otherwise stated, all the code examples in this page assume you are using Scala 2.

Introduction

An advanced mechanism for formatting type errors and inspecting missing implicits has been introduced in Scala 2.13.6. It is based on the compiler plugin splain.

This tool abstracts several classes of compiler errors with simple data types that can be processed by a few built-in routines as well as user-provided analyzer plugins.

The most significant feature is the illustration of chains of implicit instances that allows a user to determine the root cause of an implicit error:

Basic Configuration

• -Vimplicits enables printing of implicit chains
• -Vtype-diffs enables colored diffs for found/required errors

Additional Configuration

-Vimplicits-verbose-tree shows the implicits between the error site and the root cause, see [#implicit-resolution-chains].

-Vimplicits-max-refined reduces the verbosity of refined types, see [#truncating-refined-types].

Features

The error formatting engine provides the following enhancements:

Infix Types

Instead of shapeless.::[A, HNil], prints A :: HNil.

Found/Required Types

Rather than printing up to four types, only the dealiased types are shown as a colored diff:

Implicit Resolution Chains

When an implicit is not found, only the outermost error at the invocation point is printed by the regular error reporter. Previously, the flag -Xlog-implicits caused the compiler to print all information about processed implicits, but the output was highly verbose and contained all invalid implicits for parameters that have been resolved successfully. The flag has been renamed to -Vimplicits and prints a compact list of all involved implicit instances. -Xlog-implicits will continue to work as a deprecated alias.

Here, !I stands for could not find implicit value, the name of the implicit parameter is in yellow, and its type in green.

If the parameter -Vimplicits-verbose-tree is given, all intermediate implicits will be printed, potentially spanning tens of lines. An example of this is the circe error at the top of the page.

For comparison, this is the regular compiler output for this case:

[error] /path/Example.scala:20:5: could not find implicit value for parameter a: io.circe.Decoder[A]
[error]   A.fun
[error]     ^

Infix Type and Type Argument Line Breaking

Types longer than 79 characters will be split into multiple lines:

implicit error;
!I e: String
f invalid because
!I impPar4: List[
  (
    VeryLongTypeName ::::
    VeryLongTypeName ::::
    VeryLongTypeName ::::
    VeryLongTypeName
  )
  ::::
  (Short :::: Short) ::::
  (
    VeryLongTypeName ::::
    VeryLongTypeName ::::
    VeryLongTypeName ::::
    VeryLongTypeName
  )
  ::::
  VeryLongTypeName ::::
  VeryLongTypeName ::::
  VeryLongTypeName ::::
  VeryLongTypeName
]

Truncating Refined Types

Refined types, like T { type A = X; type B = Y }, can get rather long and clutter up error messages. The option -Vimplicits-max-refined controls how many characters the refinement may take up before it gets displayed as T {...}. The default is to display the unabridged type.