Guillaume Laforge wrote:

True, although it could be changed to a keyword. "static" is already taken in Java (and C and C++) to mean something else, but we could think of another keyword, e.g. "typed."

I'm surprised you're so sure how people would use this particular feature. I work with the one language I know of that has optional typing for efficiency: Lisp. In our code base, it's not used too much, because (a) most people worry about getting the job done, and only focus on performance when it becomes a problem, and (b) it tends to clutter up the code, and people don't want to clutter up the code for no good reason. It seems a strong possibility that this would turns out the same way in Groovy. However, it's also possible things will turn out the way you say.

But, I'm not sure it's such a bad thing. People tend to assume things are static, and are surprised by the (possibility of) the dynamic nature. For example, people are often surprised that mylist.size() can't be compiled to mylist.length. They're even more surprised that when used in a loop, that it isn't resolved just the first time through but every time through.

I'm worried that this will end up turning into a Sufficiently Smart Compiler, something that's so hard to do right that it never happens:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler

True, but it would often be "fast enough." If Groovy is, say, 10 to 20 times slower than Java, and by sprinkling a few keywords or annotations around you can get it 2 times slower, that will often be good enough, and there'll be no reason to rewrite it in Java.

Actually, that's not true. The main product of the company I work for is a search engine for air fares. It's used by some of the main travel sites in the U.S. (Orbitz.com and Kayak.com), and by most big U.S. airlines. It's very performance intensive code; whenever you do a search, it takes many seconds to find the answer, and that's one of the biggest complaints. Yet it's not written in C/C++ or any other statically typed language. It's written in Lisp.

Why? Because its complex algorithmic code, and it would be several times longer in a statically typed language. It would be even harder to understand. There's no single bottleneck, there are around 20 stages, and depending on the query each of them can take a significant amount of time.

So, I think it's a shame that Groovy can't replace Java, and I really don't see why it couldn't.

Faster than Ruby and Python is realistic without compiler hints, but it seems that significantly faster than that is relatively easy to do.

I wonder: how often are the more extreme dynamic aspects of Groovy, or any dynamic language, actually used? How often is a meta object protocol (other than default ones) actually used? How often are per-instance MOPs used? How often are the changed at runtime?

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