Groovy++ v0.2 Small version number but huge milestone

Today is very big day for Groovy++ team and me personally. Version 0.2 of Groovy++ is available now for download. Please go to http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest/ and give it a try.

Only (or already) 17 weeks ago we opened very first preview of Groovy++. It was very fresh and far from stable version - more proof of concept than anything usable. We did not know even if it is interesting experiment or something, which will become serious project.

A lot of things changed since that point.

• We implemented compiler and a lot of functionalityon top of it
• We have three times more not yet implemented ideas
• We know now that there is huge interest in community for statically typed Groovy
• We  fixed (created and fixed truly speaking) 200 bugs
• We have more that 700 tests
• We even wrote some amount of documentation
• We achived Java level of performance
• We took (really hard) decision and made public promise that next version (v0.3 in 4-6 weeks from now) will be fully open-sourced

I want to express my gratitude to my company MBTE Sweden AB for sponsoring the project, to many friends and collegues from brilliant Groovy community for trust,  support and constructive critique of our ideas - especially to Dierk Koenig, Paul King, Graeme Rocher and Andres Almiray. Without amazing job done by Groovy Core development team leaded by Guillaume Laforge and Jochen Theodorou nothing we developed could be possible. It was great pleasure and honor to have Roshan Dawrani and Evgeny Goldin working together with our team. Their help is invaluable for us and we hope for continuation.

So what is Groovy++?

Groovy++ is statically typed extension of Groovy programming language, which gives together high performance of compiled code and compile type checks.

Additionally to all goodies of standard Groovy it adds a lot of functionality

• compile time checking of code
• as fast as Java performance of compiled code
• easy mixing of statically and dynamically typed code
• very powerful type inference
• tail recursion
• traits (interfaces with default implementation)
• extension methods (compile time categories)
• standard library of utilities for functional programming, concurrency and distributed computing (early prototype stage)

There is enough information on particular features available in Groovy++ documentation and External Resources

We are always happy to answer questions in Groovy++ Discussion Group So you are always welcome there both to learn more and share your expirience with us. At the end of the day we develop Groovy++ not only for ourselves but for you, our users.