Scalding Exception: diverging implicit expansion for type com.twitter.algebird.Semigroup[T]

I was just doing a again some scalding jobs and again got an .. interesting exception:

In a groupBy operation, I wanted to sum something up using:

.groupBy('a) {
  _.sum('a -> 'c)
}

And was rewarded with this one:

[error] example.scala:20: diverging implicit expansion for type com.twitter.algebird.Semigroup[T]
[error] starting with method eitherSemigroup in object Semigroup
[error]       _.sum('a -> 'c)
[error]            ^
[error] one error found
[error] (compile:compile) Compilation failed

WTF??

Solution:

Spot the mistake? It’s the missing type hint at sum:

.groupBy('a) {
  _.sum<strong>[Int]</strong>('a -> 'c)  //  <-- [Int]
}