[GROOVY-8329] Consider statically typed/compiled as default for Groovy

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Endre Stølsvik
• Created: 24/Sep/17 22:22
• Updated: 08/Feb/22 19:23

Description

Personally, I do not understand why anyone would ever want to drop typing from JVM based languages (or in any other language, for that matter). Thus, I only started using Groovy "for real" when I discovered the @CompileStatic annotation, which really made everything great!

If I could choose, I'd go for statically typed by default, with @DynamicCompile or somesuch as an annotation I could turn on for methods that uses the XML parsing features etc.

To me, it seems like more and more people are realizing that statically typed languages is the way to go, notice e.g. TypeScript, Facebook's retrofitting of types onto PHP with Hack, and even PHP's own typing in PHP 7.

Now with Kotlin joining the fray of JVM-based languages, whose literally first two words on the wepage is "statically typed", getting special support in Spring, and - notably - getting full support in Gradle, I'd say that this applies more than ever. If Groovy "looses Gradle" to Kotlin due to the ability to get a statically typed build script (oh, the joy!), I believe Groovy will have a much harder time attracting new users. Turning Groovy into one of the statically typed JVM languages, instead of hampering users with "everything is an Object"-based runtime resolution, will increase the appeal of the language.

The 3.0 can be a great point to change this. It could of course be reverted back to previous logic by some -D switch (would need support in IDEs too, I guess), or by sticking some magic "whole-sale annotation" at the top of the source file, or something like this.

Issue Links

• is related to: GROOVY-8335 Statically typed file ending: "HelloWorld.groovys" is considered @CompileStatic