Groovy Roadmap

Groovy 1.6

• Maintenance releases
• Backport of minor features from 1.6 when valuable

Groovy 1.7

• Upgrade to ASM 3
  • if necessary or deemed useful (more efficient bytecode?)
• Nested Classes & Anonymous Inner Classes
  • GEP
    • The exact semantics with relationship to the MOP should be properly defined through a GEP
• Features to be considered
  • Improved assert statement
  • Enhanced annotations
    • allow the use of closures, ranges, etc as annotation parameters
    • allow annotations in more places (see JSR-308), in particular, annotating methods calls, declarations, or statements in general
  • Loosen the parentheses omission for command statements
  • Facilities for viewing / constructing ASTs
    • Option in Swing console to view the AST with a JTree or as equivalent new Expression() like code
    • API to parse Groovy snippets and return a fully built AST fragment
    • AST Builder to simplify further the creation of ASTs when manipulating AST from Groovy
  • Builder metadata system for IDE discovery and code completion
• Potential integration of GParallelizer for Groovy actors
• Potential integration of GParsec for parser combinators in Groovy

Groovy 2.0

• Upgrade to Antlr 3
  • We'll be able to use the tooling support accompanying Antlr 3
• New MetaClass system
  • Benchmark test suites to track progress of performance across releases
  • New dynamic features that will be discussed in the GEP
  • GEP
    • defining the scope of changes
    • describing the new system
    • proposals of a more homogeneous system
    • homogenize categories, EMCs, custom metaclasses
    • homogenize the configuration / declaration / convetions
    • have per-thread / scoped EMCs (like categories)
    • per-module/library metaclasses

Ideas to be debated and scheduled

• Modularisation
  • Short term: maybe just split DGM or non-all jar into pieces, leverage Grapes?
  • Longer term: leverage OSGi or Jigsaw?
• Case Classes
• Generators
• List comprehensions
• Groovy incremental compiler
  • Especially useful for the Eclipse plugin
• Concurrency features, beyond the inclusion of GParallelizer
  • GEP
    • Define what coverage we'd like to bring
    • Work on this theme first as a module, and if deemed right, we can bring it back to groovy-core