Endre Stølsvik created GROOVY-8329:
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Summary: Consider statically typed/compiled as default for Groovy
3.0
Key: GROOVY-8329
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GROOVY-8329
Project: Groovy
Issue Type: New Feature
Reporter: Endre Stølsvik
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.
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