[gruvector]

Groovy performance is pretty poor in general and is mostly used for writing build scripts. It's a scripting language whereas Scala and Kotlin are better suited to writing large systems. Groovy seems to have stagnated outside of its use with gradle, whereas Scala continues to grow.

[vorg]

> Groovy seems to have stagnated outside of its use with gradle

I don't think Gradle will be using Groovy for too much longer. I looked at the source code for the recently released Gradle 2.0 and they'd replaced almost every Groovy source file with a Java version - only Groovy files specifically related to the DSL were left. And I suspect Gradle will soon open up its configuration as an API any language can use.

[rufugee]

I'm curious...why do you say it has stagnated? Seems to still be pretty popular...especially in the gradle and grails spaces.

I've done quite a bit of groovy and have really enjoyed it. After years of doing java, and then years of ruby, and then trying to go back to java, I really struggled with rationalizing the move to myself given the immense amount of extra work java required to do anything productive. Groovy made the jump palatable, and in many ways I prefer groovy to ruby.

That said, I haven't written any code which is particularly performance sensitive yet. However, groovy now has @CompileStatic, so you can statically compile the perf sensitive bits. I'm sure that doesn't completely solve the problem, but it's an option.

I really do hope Kotlin succeeds thought. Having something in the middle of groovy and scala syntax-wise with no performance concerns and the great java integration groovy brings would be spectacular.

[vorg]

> the great java integration groovy brings

I recently wrote some scripts using Clojure to test some Java I'd written. It worked great, and I could use a macro to get rid of some duplication that functions couldn't.