This is a little out of date, but gives a rough idea:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Any-guesstimated-release-dates-for-2.8-final--p24919161.html
Based on my experience with the nightlies, and porting some code to 2.8, I would add about 2 months to those estimates. You can get a feel for the activity here:
https: // lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/timeline
2.8 is a big release, including:
- unnested packages
- new collections library
- hashCode() of mutable collections now throws Unhashable
- new arrays
- named/default params
- case classes generate copy() methods
- @specialised
- fixed equality / hash code handling across primitives and boxed primitives
- RichString replaced by WrappedString
- so that "abc".reverse.reverse == "abc"
- ability to control annotation targeting (i.e. field, getter or setter; class or constructor)
- support for nested annotations
- delimited continuations compiler plugin
- better compiler support for the Eclipse Scala Plugin
- refactored actors implementation
- refactored pattern matcher implementation
- tweaked rules for implicits
- many other bug fixes...
Which is to say that it is likely to take a few release candidates to reach the elusive 2.8.0 status.