blackdrag
As for Android... you can really make Android application in Groovy now. And the NY Times guys really did/do (don't know the current state) use it for the actual app.
And I actually think you belittle Alex with your focus on Groovy++. Alex best work on Groovy was the introduction of callsite caching. That was his best and biggest work. In terms of features of the language there are surely numerous other things. But they are sources of trouble. And that is because he did never finalize his work. Instead he always wanted to have new things and added half-done code to Groovy. That goes for the stub based compilation, for mixins, for many of his internal changes. I could make a really long list. Most of these things have been a huge step forward and a huge source of trouble.
And another thing... Grails has nothing to do with Groovy on Android. And thanks to some fixes I did with Cedric you don't need to statically compile the groovy code either.
Looking at nabble a bit (I did of course not look at all your messages) I don't see what you mean with being ignored or not welcomed or ridiculed in 2006-2008. as for the back-channels, that was the situation from 2003 onwards already. back then a lot happened in IRC for example. The long discussions on the list have often only been the tip of the iceberg. As for GRegexes... it is the first time I hear about it. Remember I don't usually read many blogs and you never mentioned it on the groovy lists. So I am sorry that you have this problem. I won't say Alex is the only one at fault for this. We offered him a slow integration path of his "ideas" including a rewrite of the code, because his code was quite makeshift. He was not interested without getting money. And getting new founds from VMware is a fight, especially for Groovy. If you think VMware wants to control anything Groovy, then I think I have to tell you that this is wrong. Most of VMware doesn't even know Groovy exists. This has pros (no being bothered too much by marketing) and cons (not getting much in terms of funds). The part VMware is mostly interested in, is Grails as part of their products. And they don't care too much about what Grails does exactly either, as long as it works for them. So I really don't see VMware wanting to have everything under their control. I mean you complain also about a time long before main developers have been with VMware. From my perspective the freedom we have now is more then when there was G2One (there we always had financial problems). And before G2One is was even difficult to meet. I mean when I attended the first Paris meeting I was still student and paying everything myself.
Regarding a spec... We discuss this since... I don't know, since James had the stupid idea of doing a JSR and then not working on it. Jeremy worked a lot on it, but in the end he had to stop because of potential copyright issues with Sun. We asked them if we could take their spec and adapt it for Groovy. That of course they didn't want. Then we started with a "delta" spec. But actually this cannot work for two reasons. One is that Groovy has some quite fundamental changes of the concepts, so a simple "delta" will not do it in large parts. The other is that they too change the spec over time, making a "delta" a bit difficult. Well, ok, the later is not such a big deal, if you have some persons working on this... but we never had anyone but Jeremy. As for the spec from Guillaume... What you wrote doesn't sound quite right to me. The idea is to have a document similar to the JLS for Groovy, including code. This code is to form the TCK, and "directly" executed from that spec. Quite some tests from our test suite would then go into that spec and the spec will become part of our build, to ensure we do not accidentally change the spec with our implementation. If you want to make such a project you are welcome. But then I suggest not only looking at the very small beginnings at https://github.com/glaforge/dokspek I also suggest we discuss the exact thing on the list first - and that without letting us be blinded by emotion please.
Yes, the distribution contains 2 jars now, one for the groovy parts being precompiled with the invokedynamic port as well as the invokedynamic implementation itself and another one. But! The other one is not a static version. It is the normal dynamic Groovy, that was it before. Of course you can use the indy jar and use non indy code as well as you can use @CompileStatic with it. Should there be any problems in mixing indy and static compilation, please report them, they would be bugs. In both jars indy is disabled by default and needs to be enabled on the command line or as compiler option if you want to use it. The problem with having precompiled groovy code in indy simply is, that it cannot run on a pre jdk7. The alternative would be to have no indy precompiled stuff in the distribution and we may take this path later on. So the difference between the jars is, that the second jar has additionally classes for invokedynamic support and precompiles some stuff using indy, while the non-indy jar has no indy classes and is compiled like before. Static compilation has absolutely nothing to do with it. So sorry, but you say above is large nonsense and please stop spreading non-facts and false flags. Groovy 2.0.4 was released because of some critical bugs in stub compiler, that have been a bigger problem to other projects, that want to release soon a new version. As for Groovy++. If you want to hear the full story, I will tell it you, but not in public, because I am respecting Alex, but what I would have to say about this, wouldn't sound like it and is not explained in a few lines of code. Let us just say that we had some very negative vibes between us. Him being my boss in the G2One days made things especially bad.
Then about lazy evaluation... the way I know them is for example generators. There is an article on the Groovy wiki on how to make generators using groovy.lang.Closure. I don't think that lambdas in Jdk8 will allow for example partially uncompiled code or non checked code paths until needed. So the will effectively not be better than Groovy in terms of laziness.