How nice for the researchers in Lausanne - especially since Switzerland is not even part of the EU.

They seem to have signed some sort of associate membership in the European Research Area, though: http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=322, http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=259

We're probably world leaders in cherry picking. Sorry about that.

EPFL is a quite international school though, the borders get very blurry around Lausanne and Geneva.

No need to be sorry, we're all going to profit when a free software project receives funding.

What sort of features have they agreed to further implement or refine? I suspect something like this is in their grant contract.

Note that, like all EU money, the Scala people will have to fund themselves and then a year or so later would they actually see the check.

It has to do with making parallel programming more palpable. See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4178

The article says this: "A paper by Odersky states that the EU funding will mainly be provided for the definition of domain-specific languages (DSLs) in libraries." and refers to this blog post: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579

Is that the same thing?

I do believe so as the technique that Scala seeks to utilize to tackle parallel programming "is to use "language virtualization", combining polymorphic embeddings with domain-specific optimizations in a staged compilation process.".

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This thread's article has:

"Over the next five years the group of developers working at Switzerland's EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) will be receiving €2.3 million from the European Research Council."

The LMTU thread links to the blog post you mention above which contains:

"The Scala research group at EPFL is excited to announce that they have won a 5 year European Research Grant of over 2.3 million Euros to tackle the "Popular Parallel Programming" challenge. This means that the Scala team will nearly double in size to pursue a truly promising way for industry to harness the parallel processing power of the ever increasing number of cores available on each chip."

Basically they all point to the same place.

I hope the money does not come with too many strings attached in terms of reporting requirements and so on.

2.3 million euros is pocket change for the EU but for Odersky and his team it is a very large sum of money to be able to use to expand their team and to put more power behind the scala effort.

This is great! Fantastic to see government get behind innovation like Scala.