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Say you have a Groovy code like
As explained in Groovy Backstage, there is bytecode generated to achieve the
desired behaviour of printing to stdout.
The easiest way of looking at the generated bytecode is to groovyc your Groovy
source to a class file and process it with a Java Decompiler (e.g. JAD).
The resulting code looks as follows (only the relevant snippet):
There is a delegation scheme like
ScriptBytecodeAdapter.invokeMethod(...)(static method)InvokerHelper.invokeMethod(...)(static method)Invoker.invokeMethod(...)(instance method called on InvokerHelper's single instance)
Invoker calls invokeMethod(...) on the MetaClass of our class (with exceptions,
see below). It finds this MetaClass by looking it up in the MetaClassRegistry.
The Invoker holds a single instance of this registry.
Exceptions (MetaClass.invokeMethod(...) not used):
- for Closures,
Closure.invoke(...)is used - for GroovyObjects obj of type
GroovyInterceptable,obj.invokeMethod(methodName,asArray(arguments))is called - for any other
GroovyObjectobj when method invokation through its MetaClass fails,obj.invokeMethod(methodName,asArray(arguments))is called
MetaClass.invokeMethod(...) finally cares for the invokation, either by reflection or by 
.
The cool thing about MetaClass is that you can dynamically add or remove methods to it.
One can even replace the whole MetaClass in the MetaClassRegistry. See ProxyMetaClass
for an example.